KDE 3.4 is great, but it loses all my settings...
 

Hello all.

I've gotten myself into a mighty fine pickle.

I installed KDE 3.4 from RPMs (rpm -Uhv package.rpm) to upgrade from the 3.2 that came with my SuSE.

However, it's lost all the nice things that I had set up...

Konsole has lost it's nice 'Console' font, andf now insists on using the ugly 'Linux' one - I can change it back, but it doesn't remember the setting for next time.
Firefox and Thunderbird look hideous now - there are big lines in between the toolbars and everything is just plain grey - there are no longer those smooth gradients that made it look so appealing. I think the reason is that the 'themes' have stopped working...
And I can no longer do from Runlevel 3
xinit
(wait)
kde
to start up - it's got to be kdm as root, which I don't like using because it's hard to close down X again.
Also, my desktop-switching boxes don't look as good anymore, either, and I can't find out how to fix them...
Oh, and Konqueror no longer displays the full path in the title bar.

I'm not quite sure what I've done wrong - maybe there was some integrated 'kde update' feature I should have used... I don't know:(

Can anybody help me?

First off in konsole you have to save the profile and make it deafult so the fonts will be "fixed" for you.

For Thunderbird and anything else, maybe uninstalling and reinstalling them might fix it but first I'd check to see if all the fonts are still on the system and KDE is using them.

For the themes you can fix that by loading the ones you like from http://www.kde-look.org.

Konqueror.... type the location of the thing you want to open by default into the textbox and then in Konqueror settings, set that as the default startup page OR browse to the file in question OR type the URL you want, etc.

I've installed KDE 3.4 on 3 of my linux machines each of which are AMD 2500+ or better with 512mb to 1gig of ram, 80+ gig HDDs, and gforce 4 or better cards.

I'm very impressed with it now. Through the addition of baghira and some icon themes I couldn't be more pleased with the look of it. I am very happy with how responsive it is, how much they have refined it and cleaned it up. KDE's major problem in the past was too much beign thrown in with alot of disorganization.

On a side note: in case many of you who are into aesthetics you'll note that the panel when made to be transparent shows through to a static segment of the picture on the desktop. This has always troubled me. With all this accomplishment they can't even come up with a more elegant approach to this "transparency" thing? I mean, come on, other operating systems can make a real transparent panel (e.g., MAC OSX and Windows XP). Instead they simply take a picture of that small area of the desktop and apply that to the background of the panel. I think it is pathetic.

But, overall I am very pleased with how it has come together. Computing power has gone up and so has KDEs ability to create a more refined interface.

Actually, you should have used yast and on-line update to install KDE 3.4 on Suse. But since you have done it well you are stuck. There's a post referenced by someone who says he was very detailed but when you follow what he wrote he leaves out 99.999999% of what is necessary to make it work under suse. Fortunately you may be able to fumble you way through and get it done.

BUT....

You are right, KDE 3.4 does in fact mess things up quite a bit. I can add a couple things to the list.

1) SMB mount points that are mounted no longer show on the desktop even though device options are selected in window behavior to display them on the desktop and no amount of playing with those settings will bring them back. This is annoying because 3.3 of KDE did not demonstrate this issue.

2) The media player applet that can be added to the panel doesn't actually work. It does on my suse 9.1 box but that was done with the yast installer. On my FC3 boxes the media player applet does not.

3) An annoyance with the K menu has it popping up to the left of the menu instead of over the top the first time you click it. A subsequent click on it positions the menu in the correct place.

4) periodically, when you type reboot in the terminal window (which is an acceptable command to issue) when you come back the icons on your desktop will be messed up with them overlapping one another in the upper left hand corner of the screen.

5) On my suse 9.1 and on my 2nd fedora core 3 box the screen savers don't work, yet on this machine (which is a near idential install to my 2nd FC3 install) the screen saver does work properly. I noticed that some of the screen savers were actually missing on this machine though even though they were working only hours before I upgraded to KDE 3.4.

6) the integrated knetattach is a great tool except it doesn't actually mount the network share anywhere. You can remote:/ and get a list of temporary shares but they don't become part of the file system so you can't actually access them say from a media player such as Kaffine or XMMS or gxine, etc. You have to copy the file locally, which in my opinion is total and utter bullshit--as it should be in any sane person's mind.

Hmm. the screensaver doesn't seem to kick in on my box, either. Neither can I configure them...

How irritating.

The Konsole thing worked, so thanks, but let me just show you a before-and-after of Firefox:

http://www.yellowmackerel.co.uk/forum/ffgc.png

You see what I mean, right?

And it isn't a whole new look I want, it's just the look I had before which seems to have been obliterated.


I don't suppose anybody knows what I can do now to get the kde command back?
I liked the cmd-level control I had over what went on...

Let's not let Linux get too braindead!

(In case I didn't clarify it properly before, I used to type xinit to bring up an X session with a plain xterm and nothing else - then I'd type kde in the xterm to get my norml desktop. I still had the the terminal kde was launched from visible - that's my main gripe, because I can't seem to have that anymore, typing kdm from Runlevel3.

[edit]
Have I done it wrong, or is it not possible to post images here? I've never had cause to do it before...

those are interesting things you said you had doing there

it's important to delete the ~/.kde folder when you upgrade kde

the format of the entries and the names of the entries may have changed and the old config files might just send kdelibs and all the apps using it hashing through stuff it can't understand

so i think upgrading kde is a time to start over

you have a new init file and the works

You reckon deleting ~/.kde will solve everything?

I'll give it a go.

I take it a new, updated one will be made automatically, right?

[edit]
Well I won't be doing that again in a hurry. I sort of knew that I'd lose all my settings, but my main objective now is to get Firefox (and Thunderbird) looking nice again.
Unfortunately deleting the ~/.kde folder didn't do that...

Thanks anyway, though.

Did you see my sort-of-screenshot?

Sorry :o

Yes, kde will build a new ~./kde preferences directory, but be aware that some applications (notably kooka, konqueror) store actual data in that directory tree, so back up any data (scanned images, bookmarks, etc) you wish to keep before blowing the directory away. Better yet, move .kde to old.kde and then you can copy over data as you discover that you actually needed it!

Luckily, I did almost exactly that. It didn't really solve anything though, so I just deleted the new directory (with KDE closed down, of course:) ) and restored the original one.

All I'm *really* concerned about now is making Firefox and Thunderbird look right.

And the displaying of the full directory path in Konqueror title bar.
Oh, and the screensavers, but I suspect that's a KDE thing for which they'll release a patch.

Maybe Mozilla will have something to say about the new KDE messing up their browser...

Correct me if I am wrong but I suspect the problem might be that you previously had QtPixmap installed. QtPixmap includes libraries which will give some Gtk applications a keramic look and feel, and if that is no longer installed you will end up with the normal Gtk look which you would expect if you had no Qt installation at all. I would check to see that you have libqtpixmap.so on your system, or try reinstalling it.

Well, RPM doesn't seem to know what it is, so I'm guessing that if it was there before, it didn't get updated with the rest of KDE.

Where can I get a KDE 3.4 compatible version from?

[edit]
Here are some relavant files which did get installed when I updated:
I don't know if the new versions might be incompatible with qtpixmap... That could be what it is though.

Flogging a dead horse? Nope, reviving an old thread!

I've just installed (after some considerable effort) DVDstyler on my system.

I won't go into the various difficulties along the way, but in order to get this thread rolling again, it's a wxWindows program, and it has the exact same visual difficlties as Firefox and Thunderbird.

It wouldn't compile until I installed the wxGTK packages from SuSE's RPM repository.

I'm guessing that Firefox and Thunderbird are also wxWindows programs.

With this knowledge, does anybody know how to make this problem go away?

(Refer to the picture links in my second post ^^^^^ to see what the problem is)