KDE

KDE & Qt Applications

• kdesvn, when used with KDE < 3.5.6 can cause an error message with the context menu (although this is inoffensive), telling about DCOP errors. The fix is in KDE 3.5.6.

• Some applications are much better opened only once if they support tabs. For example, Quanta and Kate. Generally, they have a command-line option to tell them to use an existing instance. Open the KDE control panel and change the file association, so that the application is launched with this option. For Kate it is -u.

• By default, KDE uses all key shortcuts control+F5, control+F6, etc... for virtual desktop switching. This prevents these keys from working in Firefox for example. The best is to disable these key shortcuts. KDE Control Center -> Regional & Accessibility -> Keyboard Shortcuts -> Shortcut Sequences.

Advanced KDE configuration

• First, using the KDE control center should *never* mess up with the KDE base installation/configuration, except when it asks for administration rights.

• The user directories used by KDE 4 under Gentoo:

~/.kde4/
~/.local/
~/.config/

The last directory (.config) seems more related to Qt stuff and themes. It also contains data about the Kmenu, but that's not the only place.

KMenu Entries

• The KMenu is built unfortunately from a number of different places. System-wide, /usr/share/applications for example. For one user, it is in config/menus/applications-kmenuedit.menu, as well as .local/share/applications.

• The KMenu entries in a user home directory will override the system ones. So using the user ones is dangerous as you may override Portage's data.

• If an entry does not appear in the KMenu, try to delete all the stuff in /var/tmp/kde-cache (and in /tmp). You can also run kbuildsyscoca4 with various options. If nothing works, try to run the menu editor and to reset the menu to the system one. It will rebuild correctly everything but will remove user defined stuff.

Wallet Subsystem

• You can disable the subsystem entirely.
• In order for Kopete not to keep asking you for the wallet password, you can deny Kopete any access to the wallet subsystem. This will force it to use the unsafe password storing option (in the configuration file). Edit the file ~/.kde/share/config/kwalletrc.

Brightness

• The default brightness (restored when KDE starts up) depends on your power management profile. Thus you can change that by configuring your power management profile.

Volume keys

• These will work in KDE if you install kmix.

Input Actions

• In KDE 4, you can configure those in System Settings -> Computer Administration -> Input Actions. You can associate hotkeys to KMenu entries (eg, launch applications this way).

Issues

• In KDE-4.2, if you uncheck the "Confirm Logout" checkbox in Session Manager, the computer reboots when you simply choose to logout.