Blast from the Past: Getting KDE on openSUSE is like playing Jenga

This post was originally published on October 16, 2009. The original can be found here.

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As part of our experiment, everyone is required to try a different desktop manager for two weeks. I chose KDE, since I’ve been using GNOME since I installed openSUSE. However, I’ve found that while trying to get a desktop manager set up one wrong move can cause everything to fall apart.

Switching from GNOME:

This was fairly simple. I started up YaST Software Management, changed my filter from “Search” to “Patterns”, and found the Graphical Environments section. Here I right clicked “KDE Base System”, and selected install. Clicking accept installed the kdebase and kdm packages, with a slew of other KDE default programs. Once this was done, I logged out of my GNOME session, and selected KDE4 as my new login session. My system was slightly confused and booted into GNOME again, so I restarted. This time, I was met with KDE 4.1.

My Thoughts on KDE 4.1:

As much as I had hated the qt look [which I erronously call the ‘quicktime’ look, due to its uncanny similarity to the quicktime app], the desktop was beautiful. The default panel was a very slick, glossy black, which looked quite nice. The “lines” in each window title made the windowing system very ugly, so I set out to turn them off. Its a fairly easy process:

KDE Application Launcher > Configure Desktop > Appearance > Windows > Uncheck the “Show stripes next to the title” box.

Once completed, my windows were simple and effective, and slightly less chunky than the default GNOME theme, so I was content.

Getting rid of the openSUSE Branding:

openSUSE usually draws much ire from me – so its not hard to imagine that I’d prefer not to have openSUSE branding on every god damn application I run, least of all my Desktop Manager. From YaST Software Management I searched for openSUSE and uninstalled every package that had the words “openSUSE” and “branding”. YaST automatically replaces these packages with alternate “upstream” packages, which seem to be the non-openSUSE themes/appearances. Once these were gone, things looked a lot less gray-and-green, and I was happy.

Oh god what happened to my login screen:

A side effect of removing all those openSUSE packages my login screen took a trip back in time, to the Windows 3.1 era. It was a white window on a  blue background with Times New Roman-esque font. After a bit of researching on the GOOG, I found out that this was KDE3 stepping up to take over for my openSUSE branding. Uninstalling the package kde3base or whatever the shit it’s called forced KDE4 to take over, and everything was peachy again.

Installing my Broadcom Wirless Driver

In order to install my driver, I followed this guide TO THE LETTER. Not following this guide actually gave YaST a heart attack and created code conflicts.

KMix Being Weird

KMix magically made my media buttons on my laptop work, however it occasionally decided to change what “audio device” the default slider was controlling. Still, having the media buttons working was a HUGE plus.

Getting Compositing to Work

I did not have a good experience with this. Infact, by fucking around with settings, I ended up bricking my openSUSE install entirely. So alas, I ended up completely re-installing openSUSE. Regardless, to install ATI drivers, follow the guide here using the one-click install method worked perfectly. After finally getting my drivers, turning on compositing was simple:

KDE Application Launcher > Configure Desktop > Appearance > Desktop > Check the “Enable Desktop Effects” box.

From KDE4.1 to KDE4.3

While KDE was really working for me, the notifications system was seriously annoying. Every time my system had an update, or a received a message in Kopete  an ugly, plain, slightly off center, gray box would appear at the top of my screen to inform me. Tyler informed me that this was caused by the fact that I wasn’t running the most recent version of KDE4. A quick check showed me that openSUSE isn’t going to use KDE4.3 until openSUSE 11.2 launches, however you can manually add the KDE 4.3 repositories to YaST, as shown on the openSUSE KDE Repository page.

After adding these repositories, I learned a painful lesson in upgrading your display manager. Do not, under any circumstances, attempt a Display Manager upgrade/switch untill you have an hour to spare,  and enough battery life to last the whole time. I did not, and even though I cancelled the install about 60 seconds in, I found that YaST had already uninstalled my display manager. Upon restart, I was met with a terminal.

From the terminal, I used the command line version of YaST to completely remove kdebase4 and kdm from my system. After that, re-installing the KDE4.3 verison of  kdm from YaST in the terminal installed all the other required applications. However, there are a shitload of dependency issues you gotta sort through and unfortunately the required action is not the same for each application.

KDE4.3

KDE4.3 is absolutely gorgeous, I’ve had no complaints with it. KMix seems to have reassigned itself again, but it assigned itself correctly. Removing the openSUSE branding was the same, but by default the desktop theme used is Air. I prefer the darker look of Oxygen, so I headed over to my desktop to fix it by following these steps:

Desktop > Right Click > Plain Desktop Settings > Change the Desktop Theme from Air to Oxygen.

Concluding Thoughts

Now that all these things are sorted out, I’m surprisingly impressed with KDE, and I might even keep it at the end of this test period for our podcast.

Let me know if you’ve ever had to change desktop managers and your woes in the comments!