&kde; stores information about your personal settings in a few different places: The hidden directory .kde (note the period at the beginning), located in your home directory, contains a large number of files that store &kde; settings. Some subdirectories you may find useful are:.kde/share/config, which contains configuration files for individual applications; .kde/Autostart, which contains links to applications which should start each time you start &kde;; and .kde/share/apps/kabc, where your address book is stored. The environment variables KDEDIR and KDEDIRS tell &kde; where its files are stored. You will usually only need to set KDEDIR to the directory in which &kde; is installed, but sometimes you might have other &kde; programs installed elsewhere: in this case, you can use the KDEDIRS environment variable. Set KDEDIRS to a list of all the directories containing &kde; programs, separated by commas. For example, if you have &kde; programs in both /usr/local/kde and /home/phil/kde, you can use export KDEDIR=/usr/local/kde,/home/phil/kde if you use bash or setenv KDEDIR=/usr/local/kde,/home/phil/kde if you use sh. contains more information about the directories that &kde; uses.