KDE

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Information, How-To and troubleshooting on KDE.
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KDE is a full featured desktop environment, known for its well integrated applications, like Konqueror, Dolphin, Plasma, KWrite and Konsole.

Contents

KDE 4.3 Arch Linux Notes

KDE 4.3 Software Compilation is the next major release of KDE that includes a number of improvements and bug fixes. The new Arch package set for KDE makes it possible to only install those applications you like.

Important changes in short:

  • Split packages; for more Information see KDE Packages and Splitting KDE.
  • Qt uses the Gstreamer backend for Phonon by default. Other backends like phonon-xine can be installed optionally.
  • Meta packages ensure a smooth upgrade and emulate the old monolith packages for those who prefer them.

Important hints for upgraders:

  • Check if your mirror is up to date.
  • pacman will ask you to replace all kde packages with kde-meta packages.
  • Do not force an update. If pacman complains about conflicts please file a bug report.
  • You can remove the meta packages and the sub packages you do not need after the update.
  • If you do not like split packages just keep using the kde-meta packages.
Information about upstream changes are be available here

Installing KDE 4.3 Software Compilation

Installing full KDE SC

To install the entire KDE set:

pacman -Sy kde

If you need language files:

pacman -S kde-l10n-yourlanguagehere

i.e. kde-l10n-de, for the German language.

Note: KDE 4.x is modular; you can install your preferred KDE applications without having to install an entire set of packages. See KDE Packages for more information.

Minimal Install

If you want to have a minimal installation of the KDE SC:

pacman -S kdebase-workspace kdebase-konsole

Starting KDE

Running KDE depends on your preferences. Basicly there are two ways of starting KDE. Using KDM or xinitrc.

KDM (KDE Display Manager)

It is highly recommended to get familiar with the full article concerning display managers, before you make any changes. See also KDM Wiki page.

deamon method

Add "kdm" to deamons array in /etc/rc.conf

DAEMONS=(dbus hal syslog-ng network netfs crond ... kdm)

inittab method

Edit /etc/inittab and comment out:

#id:3:initdefault:

[...]

#x:5:respawn:/usr/bin/xdm -nodaemon

Then uncomment:

id:5:initdefault:

[...]

x:5:respawn:/usr/bin/kdm -nodaemon
Note: In both metods KDM loads Xorg automaticly.

xinitrc

The meaning of xinitrc is very well described here.

Edit /home/your-username/.xinitrc in your home directory. Then uncomment:

exec startkde 

After reboot and login, every execution of Xorg (startx or xinit) will start KDE automaticly.

Note: If you want to start Xorg at boot please read Start X at boot article.

Configuring

Note: Configuring KDE is primarily done in 'System Settings'. There are also a few other options available for the desktop with 'Desktop Settings' when you right click the desktop.

For other personalization options not covered below such as activities, different wallpapers on one cube, etc please refer to the Plasma wiki page

Personalization

How to set up the KDE desktop to your personal style; use different Plasma themes, window decorations and icon themes.

What is Plasma?

Plasma is a desktop integration technology that provides many functions from displaying the wallpaper to adding widgets to the desktop.

Plasma themes

Plasma themes can be installed through the Desktop Settings control panel. If you like to have them installed system-wide, themes can be found in both the official repositories and AUR.

Window Decorations

Window decorations can be changed in the System Settings > Appearance > Windows control panel and some are available on AUR.

KDE 4 Theme Integration with GTK Applications

To better integrate GTK and KDE 4 themes, you can use QtCurve.

pacman -Sy qtcurve-gtk2 qtcurve-kde4

To change the GTK theme to QtCurve a few applications are available:

pacman -S lxappearance
pacman -S gtk-theme-switch2
pacman -S gtk-chtheme

Then change the theme to QtCurve in the repective application:

lxappearance
switch2
gtk-chtheme

If you're using Oxygen icons and want a consistent look in GTK open/save dialogs, you can install an oxygenrefit2 icon theme from AUR and set it as your GTK icon theme. Add the theme to the ~/.gtkrc-2.0 file or you can use lxappearance and set it.

gtk-icon-theme-name="OxygenRefit2"

There are also a couple GTK themes built on the gtk-kde42-oxygen-theme Oxygen style that can also do this.

Icon Themes

Not many full system icons themes are available for KDE 4. You can open up System Settings > Appearance > Icons and browse for new ones or install them manually. Many of them can be found on kde-look.org.

Arch Linux Logo Icon in Kicker menu

Right-Click on the Kicker menu button, press "Application launcher settings" and then press the icon on the right. Then you may choose Arch Linux icon or any other icon that will replace the default one.

Plasmoids

KDE 4 supports plasmoids (aka plasma applets, and widgets). These are also available in the repositories or you can find more on kde-look.org.

Fonts

If you have personally set up how your Fonts render, be aware that System Settings may alter their appearance. When you go 'System Settings > Appearance > Fonts' System Settings will likely alter your font configuration file (fonts.conf). There is no way to prevent this but if you set the values to match your fonts.conf file the expected font rendering will return (it will require you to restart your application or in a few cases for you to have to restart your desktop). Note too that Gnomes' Font Preferences will also do this if you use both desktop environments.

Networking/Printing

Samba/Windows support

If you want to have access to Windows services:

pacman -S samba

You may then configure your Samba shares through

 System Settings > Advanced (Tab) > Samba

Printing support

Tip: Use the web frontend of CUPS for quicker configuration.
Printers configured this way are available in KDE applications.

You may also prefer the printer configuration through 'System Settings > Printer Configuration'.

Powersaving

Since v.4.2, KDE has integrated Powersaving service called "Powerdevil Power Management". You may need to configure powersaving, especially on notebooks and netbooks that need to have the CPU core default on powersaving options or the screen brightness set lower.

Install cpufrequtils

pacman -S cpufrequtils

and make sure you have your CPU's cpufreq module loaded. For more information on this, visit this article.

Then, in 'System Settings > Advanced (Tab) > Power Management' configure the options the way you prefer.

System Administration

PolicyKit integration

Since v4.3, KDE has PolicyKit authorisation integration. That means that you can now configure PolicyKit settings through

 System Settings > Advanced (Tab) > PolicyKit Authorisation

according to what you want to configure for your system.

Akonadi and external MySQL-Server

As of December 2009, akonadi's configuration panel does not offer the option to connect to an external MySQL-server via TCP. You can however enable this via its configuration file (it's located within ${HOME}/.config/akonadi, the file is called akonadiserverrc). After you've stopped akonadi from the command line (with akonadictl stop) Open the file with your favorite editor, and edit it like so:

 [QMYSQL]
 Name=${DBNAME}
 User=${USER}
 Password=${YOUR_PASSWORD_FOR_THE_USER}
 Options=
 ServerPath=/usr/sbin/mysqld
 StartServer=false
 Host=${THE_IP_WHERE_MYSQL_RUNS}
 Port=3306

(of course, substitute your values for variables here)

Test your setup from the command line (akonadictl start). If it starts, you succeeded and akonadi will now connect to MySQL via TCP. stop it once more, and go to system settings -> akonadi configuration (on the "Advanced" tab) and click "start" on the "Akonadi Server configuration" tab to restart akonadi. Alternatively, restart KDE.

Desktop Search and Semantic Desktop

Nepomuk

From Wikipedia:

NEPOMUK-KDE is featured as one of the newer technologies in KDE 4. It uses the RDF store Soprano and, on a technical level, :allows associating metadata to various items present on a normal user's desktop such as files, bookmarks, e-mails, and :calendar entries. Metadata can be arbitrary RDF; as of KDE 4, tagging is the most user-visible metadata application.

Nepomuk is enabled by default. Nepomuk can be turned on and off in

 System Settings > Advanced > Desktop Search

Visit this Wikipedia article for more information. See here, here and here for additional information.

Strigi Search

KDE4 has Strigi for file indexing. It is located under Desktop Search, like Nepomuk. It can be turned on only if Nepomuk is turned on as well.

Strigi indexes your files and helps you find them easily after by just pressing

Alt + F2

and typing what you want to find.

Nepomuk/Strigi search is also integrated into Dolphin. By default, Dolphin has a search bar on top-right where you may type what you want to be found from Strigi's index. If you want to use the advanced Nepomuk searching features (that are going to be implemented into Dolphin's search bar in KDE 4.4 release) add this on the location bar

 nepomuksearch:search term

where search term is the term you want to make the search for.

Note: Strigi has implications for resource usage on your computer - CPU, memory, disk access, disk space, battery life. If Strigi is too resource-hungry for you, you can turn it off in "System Settings > Advanced > Desktop Search".

Strigi index folders can be configured in "Advanced" tab.

Tip: An efficient alternative to Strigi is Recoll 1.

KDM (KDE Desktop Manager)

KDM Xserver file

An example configuration for KDM can be found at /usr/share/config/kdm/kdmrc. See /usr/share/doc/HTML/en/kdm/kdmrc-ref.docbook for all options.

Configure KDM as root

You cannot configure KDM settings when launching System Settings as user. In order to do that, press

Alt + F2

and type

 kdesu systemsettings

In the pop-up kdesu window, enter your root password and wait for System Settings to be launched.

Note: Since you have launched it as root, be careful when changing your settings. All settings configuration in root-launched System Settings are saved under /root/.kde4 and not under ~/.kde4 (your home location).

In the System Settings window, go to

 Advanced (Tab) > Login Manager

Phonon

What is Phonon ?

Phonon is the multimedia API for KDE 4. Phonon was created to allow KDE 4 to be independent of any single multimedia framework such as GStreamer or xine and to provide a stable API for KDE 4's lifetime. It was done for various reasons: to create a simple KDE/Qt style multimedia API, to better support native multimedia frameworks on Windows and Mac OS X, and to fix problems of frameworks becoming unmaintained or having API or ABI instability.

from Wikipedia.

Which backend should I choose ?

KDE4 on Arch Linux has Gstreamer backend for Phonon. But there are more backends as well. You could use Xine ( phonon-xine ), Mplayer ( phonon-mplayer-svn ) , or VLC ( phonon-vlc-svn ).

Troubleshooting

KHotkeys issue

Ιf khotkeys does not work, make sure you have a fully updated system first.

You can also create ~/.kde4/Autostart/reloadkhotkeys.sh with contents

#!/bin/bash
(sleep 3 && qdbus org.kde.kded /modules/khotkeys reread_configuration) &

and then do a

chmod u+x ~/.kde4/Autostart/reloadkhotkeys.sh

then logout & login.

Enabling thumbnails under Konqueror and Dolphin file managers

For thumbnails of videos in konqueror and dolphin:

 pacman -S kdemultimedia-mplayerthumbs

First login on KDE is slow

The first login takes a while; no need to worry. KDE is creating all the proper configuration files under ~/.kde4 in order to start.

I encounter problems with automounting (or) KDE behaves strangely for no apparent reason

Possible HAL problem

HAL not installed/not running

It is possible that you have not installed HAL yet.

Install HAL

  pacman -S hal

if it is not already installed and then add it to the DAEMONS array in /etc/rc.conf for full media functionality.

Consolekit session not running

ck-launch-session command attaches a consolekit session to the X session that is going to run, and it is needed by HAL.

If you are starting KDE with startx try adding ck-launch-session to the .xinitrc, as so:

#!/bin/sh
#
# ~/.xinitrc
#
# Executed by startx (run your window manager from here)
# exec gnome-session
exec ck-launch-session startkde
# exec startxfce4
# ...or the Window Manager of your choice

This is done automatically with KDM.

Tip: This should also clear up any power (i.e. suspend to RAM/Disk) issues you may also be having.

Possible previous KDE4 faulty settings

It may be possible that some previous KDE4 settings in ~/.kde4 may be configured in a wrong way (by an application, by the user etc). If you cannot find any way to solve the problem by editing/configuring/deleting/adding settings in ~/.kde4, deletethe whole directory or just ~/.kde4/share/config and restart KDE.


Suspend to Disk/Ram not working

If suspend to disk/ram does not work then try installing acpid with

  pacman -Sy acpid

It will autoload with hal, also make sure you are in the power group (remember to logout)

Also, if you are starting KDE with startx try adding ck-launch-session to the .xinitrc, as so:

#!/bin/sh
#
# ~/.xinitrc
#
# Executed by startx (run your window manager from here)
# exec gnome-session
exec ck-launch-session startkde
# exec startxfce4
# ...or the Window Manager of your choice

This is done automatically with kdm.

GPG and SSH

To disable gpg-agent and/or ssh-agent in KDE sessions, edit /etc/kde/env/agent-startup.sh and /etc/kde/shutdown/agent-shutdown.sh.

Graphics' related issues

Low 2D desktop performance (or) Artifacts appear when on 2D

Possible driver problem

Make sure you have the proper driver for your card installed, so that your desktop is at least 2D accelerated. Follow these articles for more information: ATI, NVIDIA, Intel_Graphics for more information, in order to make sure that everything is all right.

The opensource ATI and Intel drivers and the proprietary Nvidia driver should provide the best 2D acceleration.

Faulty KDE graphics' settings under ~/.kde4

See this section for more information.

Low 3D desktop performance

KDE begins with desktop effects enabled. Older cards may be insufficient for 3D desktop acceleration. You can disable desktop effects in

System Settings > Desktop 

or you can toggle desktop effects with Alt + Shift + F12


Note: You may encounter such problems with 3D desktop performance even when using a more powerful graphics card, but using catalyst proprietary driver (fglrx). This driver is known for having issues with 3D acceleration. Visit the ATi Wiki page for more troubleshooting.

Sound problems under KDE

ALSA related problems

Note: First make sure you have alsa-lib and alsa-utils installed.
"Falling back to default" messages when trying to listen to any sound in KDE

When you encounter such messages:

The audio playback device <name-of-the-sound-device> does not work.
Falling back to default

Go to

System Settings > Multimedia

and set the device named "default" above all the other devices in each box you see.

I cannot play mp3 files when having Gstreamer backend in Qt Phonon

That can be solved by installing gstreamer0.10-plugins

 pacman -S gstreamer0.10-plugins

You can also change the backend used by Phonon, by installing the phonon-xine

 pacman -S phonon-xine

if you encounter problems that are not solved after installing gstreamer plugins. Then choose Xine in

 System Settings > Multimedia > Backend (tab)

(it may have been autoselected after installing phonon-xine)

Amarok "waits" before playing any track

If you have encountered this error, the problem is backend specific. In order to solve this problem, change Amarok's backend from gstreamer to xine.

OSS4 related problems

I have OSS4 installed, but I have problems with Kmix etc

Developers of Kmix are still integrating OSSv4 support. There is an AUR package that is still experimental.

Arch uses phonon with the Gstreamer backend that should work for most applications. Alternately you could try phonon with Xine.

I wanted a minimal installation of KDE. After I installed some packages and logged in KDE, there are no panels

If you wanted a minimal installation of KDE, logged in, heard the login sound but nothing else happened, you may not have installed the Plasma binaries. These are included in

  kdebase-workspace

Install this package and restart Xorg.

I want a fresh installation of KDE for my system. What should I do ?

If you really want that, just rename the settings directory of KDE (just in case you'll need a backup later):

mv ~/.kde4 ~/.kde4-backup

Plasma desktop behaves strangely but I do not know what to do

Plasma issues are caused mainly by unstable plasmoids or plasma themes. First, find which was the last plasmoid or plasma theme you had installed and disable it or even remove it.

If you cannot find which the problem is, but you do not want all the KDE settings to be lost, do:

  rm -r ~/.kde4/share/config/plasma*

This command will delete all plasma configs of your user and when you will relogin into KDE, you will have the default settings back.

My external HDD/my CD/DVD cannot be found by Device Notifier plasmoid (or) is not automounted

That might happen if you have devicekit related packages installed, like devicekit-disks . It seems to work properly only GNOME.

So, remove anything devicekit related

# pacman -Rcn $(pacman -Q | grep devicekit | awk '{print $1}')

restart HAL

# /etc/rc.d/hal restart

and relogin into KDE. Your external HDD or CD/DVD can be found or automounted again.

Warning: Make sure that this problem occurs on your machine only due to DeviceKit operations and not due to hardware issues. Removing DeviceKit makes GNOME's hard disk related features not to work properly.

Other KDE projects

The Chakra Project

Split KDE packages

The Chakra Project is a community-based modular version of KDE 4 and Live CD project, which includes a number of UI enhancements for KDE 4.x. Visit the Chakra Project Wiki main page for more information.

Chakra Project Arch Live CD

The Chakra Project also provides a full featured Live CD, which has the latest stable KDEmod4 packages included. You may visit the Chakra Project Live CD webpage in order to find more information.

Passing from KDEmod to [extra]'s KDE

Note: You do have instructions for passing from [extra]'s KDE4 to KDEmod4 here.

Both flavours of KDE provide the same Desktop Environment, so if you install the one or the other, in the same upstream version, there should not be any problem regarding plasmoids, themes, styles or any KDE related application.

So, if you want, for any reason, to pass from KDEmod to [extra]'s KDE, do:

 pacman -Rd kdemod

OR

 pacman -Rd kdemod-uninstall

and it should be removed, but with the -d argument, the KDE dependent packages are not uninstalled, but only the Desktop Environment. But, if you want to completelly remove any KDEmod specific application/plasmoid/style etc too, do

 pacman -Rcns kdemod

and then make sure that everything has been uninstalled:

 pacman -Q | grep kde
Note: If you want to use the same KDE specific settings from the previous KDEmod installation, move or rename ~/.kdemod4 to ~/.kde4

After this, you may have KDEmod uninstalled.

Then, follow this.

KDE unstable

KDE svn

If you want to install an unstable KDE version, visit this thread

and follow the instructions there.

It is currently inactive.

KDEmod testing/unstable

You may visit this webpage and see which repos can you add in pacman.conf in order to test the KDEmod unstable packages.

KDE unstable (snapshot)

The member ProgDan has created a repo where he uploads the testing KDE packages when a new upstream snapshot is out. You may visit this topic for more information.

KDE Legacy

Downgrading to KDEmod3 from KDE 4.3

For those people who decide that KDE 4.3 is still not yet "ready" for them, there is a website about how to downgrade to a version of KDE 3.5 called kdemod3:

Warning: There have been issues reported regarding Libjpeg7, that caused KDEmod3 to behave strangely. In order to solve that, install libjpeg6 from AUR. More info here

Bugs

Common bugs

If you think you found something that seems like bug, please see Common_Issues and regarding that: KDE 4 config files are usually located at

~/.kde4/share/config/

and for app-specific configs

~/.kde4/share/apps/

Distro and Upstream bug report

It is preferrable that if you find a minor or serious bug, you should visit the Arch Bug Tracker or/and KDE Bug Tracker in order to report that. Make sure that you be clear on what you want to report.

External Links

Personal tools