KDE customization and theming

This article helps with the customization of KDE 3.5+.

Tips and Hints

• Installing a custom icon set can be done directly from the Control Center, but then the .tar.gz archive must be selected - do not unpack it.
• Basically, almost all can be controlled from the Control Center: Style, Window Decorations, Icons, Colors are the most important modules (in "Appearance & Themes").

Konqueror Integration

• Some applications should have their "Enable Launch Feedback" option turned off, else this confuses KDE. This is the example of some applications that are already loaded (open), but that we open again from Konqueror in order to edit a file. For example, Quanta-Plus falls in this category.
• Subversion integration is available via the KDEsvn package. There is also built-in SVN integration in KDE, but it is not as good and probably should not be used.
• Ark (support for extracting and compressing archives) integration is available.

Beryl Installation

• The best way to customize KDE is probably to install Beryl. To use Beryl with KDE, select Aquamarine as the window decorator. I like to use the Crystal module in Window Decorations.

• Add to the file /etc/env.d/99kde-env (use this file, it will ensure that Beryl is always started) the following line:

KDEWM=/usr/bin/beryl-manager

GTK Applications

• To make GTK applications use the KDE styles, a GTK engine, GTK-Qt, is available. The Portage package name is gtk-engines-qt. On amd64 the stable version seems to be 0.7-r1, I could not get the latest ebuild to work correctly.

• On the whole, this engine seems to work pretty well, with the exception of Firefox. This is maybe because Firefox uses 32 bit libraries, as Thunderbird works correctly. I don't know the location of the configuration file for GTK-Qt.

Useful links

There are a few themes that are present in Portage. The majority however must be manually downloaded and installed, for example from the following website.

• KDE-Look website