Installing
In order to use you obviously need to have it installed and running on your system. There are two approaches for doing this, which are described in the next sections.

Installing a Precompiled Binary Release
The quickest and easiest way to get up and running is to install precompiled binary packages for your system. Most recent distributions include , and if it is 2.0 or later it will include . If is not included on your installation media it may be available as a download from your operating system vendor. Alternatively it may be available from third parties. Make sure that you use packages that are compatible with your operating system version.
A basic install of will include the sound server, allowing most applications to play sound. If you want the full set of multimedia tools and applications you will likely need to install additional optional packages.
The disadvantage of using precompiled binaries is that they may not be the most recent version of . This is particularly likely if they are provided on , as the pace of development of and is such that media cannot usually keep pace. You may also find that, if you have one of the less common architectures or operating system distributions, precompiled binary packages may not be available and you will need to use the second method.

Building From Source
While time consuming, the most flexible way to build is to compile it yourself from source code. This ensures you have a version compiled optimally for your system configuration and allows you to build the most recent version.
You have two choices here -- you can either install the most recent stable version included with or you can get the most recent (but possibly unstable) version directly from the project CVS repository. Most users who aren't developing for should use the stable version. You can download it from ftp://ftp.kde.org or one of the many mirror sites. If you are actively developing for you probably want to use the CVS version. If you want to use aRts without KDE, you can download a standalone development snapshot from http://space.twc.de/~stefan/kde/arts-snapshot-doc.html.
Note that if you are building from CVS, some components of ( the basic core components including the sound server) are found in the CVS module kdelibs, while additional components (⪚ artsbuilder) are included in the. This may change in the future. You may also find a version in the kmusic module; this is the old (pre- 2.0) version which is now obsolete.
The requirements for building are essentially the same as for building . The configure scripts should detect your system configuration and indicate if any required components are missing. Make sure that you have a working sound driver on your system (either the OSS/Free driver in the kernel, OSS driver from 4Front Technologies, or ALSA driver with OSS emulation).
More information on downloading and installing (including ) can be found in the .