KDE 3.4 downgrade
 

I have just installed Mandriva 2006 (fresh installation) and KDE looks really bad. The problem is that I am using an old Dell laptop - 400 MHz and 256 MB. Before this I was running Mandrake 10.1 that had KDE 3.2 (if I am not mistaking). And it worked really fine.

So how is it possible to make a downgrade of KDE from 3.4 to 3.3? What packages should I downgrade?

This probably won't work too well. You'd either have to build your own KDE 3.3 or 3.2 from source or use the packages from an earlier version of Mandrake - and you'll have to force install them since the dependencies will be unresolvable - this will probably mess up your system badly.

Have you tried to find out what is actually slowing your computer down? Have you tried disabling Kat (kded)? I'd say its most likely Kat or something like that if your computer worked fine with KDE 3.2 or 3.3.

Also, what do you mean by "looks really bad"? Do you mean there aren't many colors or the resolution is really low? If that's the case, it's possible that Mandriva didn't pick the right video card or monitor for your system.

So, I have not yet tried to disable Kat. Will do try it today. The problem with KDE is that in lists, for example the Desktop contextual menu, images are some good two-three centimeteres away from the text itself. Another problem was in Opera's standard skin. The menu images where bundled together in an ugly and irregular mix of images. For example the on the address bar, the back, forward and reload images were practically in the same place, while the respective buttons were well at their place. There I managed to solve the problem by choosing Opera's native skin, and by placing on all toolbars by default text buttons (without images). And there are strange vertical lines that appear on the bottom panel. Changing panel baground images sorted it out in a sort, but not completely. Otherwise the difficult look, KDE works pretty fine and pretty fast for the ressources given.

And the resolution looks fine - although you put a doubt in my mind and apparently the card was corectly chosen. I kinda looked at the configuration during post-installation.

I still plan to install XFCE. I understood that it was a good alternative for KDE. Are there any other decent alternatives? But, still, I would like to have a healthy KDE on my system.

ps And, in KDE, is where can I change the style of the whole desktop environment, so that it look exactly like a Mac computer? I saw that option once on Slackware, but Slackware worked so ugly with my hardware that I changed back fast.

Those sound like very weird issues to me. I don't think I'd blame them on the video card OR low resources. I'm not really sure what I'd blame them on to tell you the truth. Gremlins in your box? :scratch: Well if you want to try some new themes to see if that will sort things out for you, go to KDE-Look at www.kdelook.org . Basically you'll want a new theme, but you can also get new boot screens and login screen and such if you like. Just look around for the directions on how to apply them to your computer.

Actually, if I had one guess as to what is giving you issues in Mandriva 2006, I'd say it's the move to xorg 6.9. It's pretty new, and it might have killed some video drivers just enough so that you've got the little glitches that you describe and not the huge massacred desktop that you'd expect if you had a driver for the wrong card.

....on the subject of themes, is there a theme manager in Mandriva, all I see is... colors, style and window decorations sections in `look and feel`. 3 sections instead of a global selectable theme?

Thanks for the tips. I should agree with you on xorg. The 10.0 Community worked perfectly, while 10.1 Official glitched at first run and then went on the good way. Changed some themes (for Plastik or Keramik) and everything went smooth. But Mandriva 2006 KDE is unusable.

Hi aerogate,

You should find a theme manager if you look in the KDE control center (I forget what the KDE control center is called, but look under system in the menu and it should be there). Almost all of the visual controls are in the KDE control center already and they're pretty good controls, so Mandriva doesn't mess with them too much. You won't find this in the Mandriva Control Center if I remember correctly.

When you install a normal theme, you pick and choose the individual components of the theme from the look & feel section unless its a thememanager theme (there are very few of these).

Thanks for the info, that makes sense

Finally it was my mistake. Mandriva picked the graphics card correctly. I installed xfce4 and continued to experience the same problems. Having changed the color depth to 65536 colors solved the problem. I still cannot understand why does Mandriva not ship (at least PowerPack) with xfce installed, as it looks much better than KDE, especially after having installed all the plugins for xfce.

Mandriva 2006
 

Anybody

I just downloaded Mandriva 2006 3 iso disks and installed them. My previous OS was mandrake 10.1, which was working very well.

My problem is with the fonts on Mandriva 2006 & extracting zip files. The fonts are all washed out when compared to 10.1. I set up the fonts the same as in 10.1.

Also when trying to extract a zip file from the tarball using KDE, there is no menu pick to do this as there was in 10.1. I downloaded KLAX Linux live with KDE 3.4.2
with it and it works perfectly on the fonts and the zip files.

Also I note that some of my 10.1 installations will not run on 2006.

At this point, Mandriva 2006 has a very very long way to go to catch up with
10.1.

K7MAG