I recently downloaded konstruct for the purpose of installing kde 3.2.2 on my computer, and upgrade from kde 3.1 i have right now, I ran konstruct which basically downloaded all the tarballs , unpacked them, ran ./configure, make and make install automatically, and if there was a dependency problem, i could download the dependency and restart make install and it would skip down to where i left off.

My problem is the new kde3.2.2 is in my /root/kde3.2.2 directory, how do I get my mandrake linux to look for kde there and not its default folder, and btw, i looked for .xsession, and the rest of the files I was told to edit to get this to work and non were in my ~/ folder, please help, thankyou.

Having it in your /root directory makes it only available for root. ( The better place would have been something like /usr/local/kde3.2.2

Anyway you need to set some environmental variables.

$KDEDIRS where ever KDE is installed.
$KDEHOME where you want to have .kde ( Useful for keeping two versions separate settings )
$QTDIR The version of Qt ( If you didn't use a different version of Qt then its fine where it is. )

You also need to add $KDEDIRS/bin ( and $QTDIR/bin if needed ) to the front of your path. and LD_LIBRARY_PATH needs $KDEDIRS/lib ( and $QTDIR/lib if needed ).

the xinit $KDEDIRS/bin/startkde will start the new version of kde.

Its this complicated if you want to keep both versions at once. ( and not install it where it normally expects to be. ) I use it to keep CVS and current versions at once.

To simplify this I use a script

.xsession if usually a simple file with something like exec startkde in it. If it doesn't exist simply create one.