Appearance of GNOME Applications in Suse 10 KDE
 

I have somehow broken the appearance of GNOME applications when they are run under KDE 3.4 or 3.5 (Suse 10). For example, in GIMP and Inkscape, the fonts are uncontrollable and large--and ugly. How can I control the appearance of GNOME applications that are run under KDE?

I would like to second this thread. I have the same problem. For some K* programs seem to do this more often. Thanks for posting thisJeffmrg. Hope someone can help resolve this.

You need to make sure you have the gtk-qt theme engine installed and choose to use KDE fonts in your gtk apps. Usually this is done from the Appearance and Themes section of kcontrol, but I can't seem to find the entry for controlling gtk-themes in Suse 10. You can remove the Suse gtk-qt theme engine and compile your own version from source and you will have the required entry in kcontrol.

Make sure you are set to 24million colors.

Do this in kcontrol

I tried a few suggestions, but without success. There are numerous instances of this behavior that I located through a web search, but no reasonably universal solution.

I should mention that when I originally installed Suse 10 (with KDE 3.4.x), all was fine. It was during an 'upgrade' to KDE 3.5 that things got broken. Well, lesson learned. I won't be doing too many whole desktop upgrades going forward. Not to be trivial about things, I am not only bothered about the broken appearance (and broken control of appearance), but who knows what else happened, with surprises yet to come.

I'd like to keep the thread going, just to see if someone out there has the solution. For myself, it may take less time to reinstall the OS than to fix this problem.

Did you uninstall the Suse gtkqt theme engine and compile your own version from source? You then have to use the gtk themes module that will appear in kcontrol -> appearance & themes to adjust the way the gtk apps look and feel. I am positive thats the solution to your problem because its worked for me on other distros.

While not a perfect solution, I did find that the following suggestion worked for the most part:

http://susewiki.org/index.php?title=...Apps_under_KDE

I was not able to compile source. I received a compile error, even with the requisite libraries and headers.

The solution I suggested is not totally manageable. I gave up and reinstalled my OS. I am starting to think that the application Inkscape is the culprit here. Any other experience along these lines? All installations that included Inkscape had the broken appearance; no Inkscape-->all is fine.

Hey Jeff,
Sorry you had to reinstall... I may have a solution that could've saved you the trouble.

The short answer is that I uninstalled the "stock" gtk-qt-engine that got upgraded when I installed KDE 3.5 on SUSE 10.0. (It lacks config options for some unknown reason). Then instead, I installed the Guru RPM:

gtk-qt-engine-0.6cvs20050709-3.guru.suse100.i686.rpm
http://linux01.gwdg.de/~pbleser/rpm-...gtk-qt-engine/

Then the KDE Control Center adjustments were trivial, found under: Appearance & Themes > GTK Styles & Fonts. I don't use Gnome at all, and only a few GTK apps, but this worked for Firefox, Thunderbird, The Gimp & Gaim.

About your larger concern about the uncertainty of upgrading something as complex as all of KDE...

I also had dependency issues and problems before I realized that I needed to add the Gnome update site to my YaST sources, (even though I don't use Gnome). You can also add the Guru site as a YaST source so the gtk-qt-engine will show up in the list. Here's my complete listing of sources in order (choose your nearest mirror of course, for the SUSE sources):
Now I have very few troubles upgrading KDE with only a few exceptions. This GTK fonts issue is one of them. (I'm posting this here so I can come back and use it as a reference later). :D

Thank you, that's a very straightforward solution and I'm glad to say that it WORKED PERFECTLY on one of my alternate, broken Suse 10 installations.

Yeah, the Guru site is great. It's where I go for solutions outside the box. I don't like hacking if there's a more elegant way of doing something. On the other hand, I don't like waiting for SUSE to publish another release. That's why I'm using (the unsupported) KDE 3.5.