Installing KDE SC 4.6 via Portage

[Matte88]

If you need, check this.

[Fitzcarraldo]

So... back to the missing icons for DavMail. I scaled a few DavMail icons and then did the following:

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cp /home/fitzcarraldo/Desktop/davmail64.png /usr/share/icons/hicolor/64x64/apps/davmail.png
cp /home/fitzcarraldo/Desktop/davmail64.png /usr/share/icons/oxygen/64x64/apps/davmail.png
cp /home/fitzcarraldo/Desktop/davmail48.png /usr/share/icons/oxygen/48x48/apps/davmail.png
cp /home/fitzcarraldo/Desktop/davmail48.png /usr/share/icons/hicolor/48x48/apps/davmail.png
cp /home/fitzcarraldo/Desktop/davmail32.png /usr/share/icons/hicolor/32x32/apps/davmail.png
cp /home/fitzcarraldo/Desktop/davmail32.png /usr/share/icons/oxygen/32x32/apps/davmail.png
cp /home/fitzcarraldo/Desktop/davmail22.png /usr/share/icons/oxygen/22x22/apps/davmail.png
cp /home/fitzcarraldo/Desktop/davmail22.png /usr/share/icons/hicolor/22x22/apps/davmail.png
cp /home/fitzcarraldo/Desktop/davmail16.png /usr/share/icons/hicolor/16x16/apps/davmail.png
cp /home/fitzcarraldo/Desktop/davmail16.png /usr/share/icons/oxygen/16x16/apps/davmail.png

Which seems to have improved things: the DavMail icon now appears sometimes in the System Tray on the Panel, but not every time I log in. Why it's not consistent, only God knows. KDE 4 can be a real pain sometimes.

[timothyRlamora]

I don't think you need knetworkmanager, when I installed it it took my network icon out of the system tray, so I removed it and my icon came back

[Fitzcarraldo]

^I found I do need KNetworkManager. I'm not going to uninstall it again now to remind myself what happened when I uninstalled it a couple of days ago to check the effect (I think the Plasma Network Management widget disappeared completely for the Add Widgets... menu), because I've been having more pressing problems with KDE 4.6.0.

Since yesterday, for no reason I can see, KDE started freezing at the splash screen on start up. To start with I could reboot a couple of times and finally get to the Deskstop, but after a while even that became impossible. The icon of the hard disk on the KDE splash screen would appear, the laptop's HDD LED would flash a few of times, and then... nothing.

I could switch to a VT, restart X and start Fluxbox without problem, so the culprit was definitely KDE. Anyway, after looking into many things (e.g. rebuilding X, rebuilding the FGLRX driver and even rebuilding the kernel), what finally got KDE to start up correctly to a Desktop -- albeit by losing all my desktop configuration yet again -- was the following:

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# mv /home/fitzcarraldo/.kde4 /home/fitzcarraldo/.kde4.old

Unfortunately KDE 4.6.0 is proving a real PITA in my case. I hope the developers release 4.6.1 asap, because 4.5.4 was working beautifully for me and my experience so far with 4.6.0 has been awful.

[timothyRlamora]

The only problems I have run into with kde 4.6.0 is thatI can't play audio cd's or dvd movies. I have got sabayon 3.4 mini on harddisk one so I play music and movies on that version

[Fitzcarraldo]

^I don't think that's due to KDE 4.6.0, though, because I don't have a problem playing Audio CDs and DVDS with KDE 4.6.0. For the former, Device Notifier gives me six options: Play Audio CD with Amarok; Open with File Manager; Play Audio CD with Kaffeine; Download Photos with Gwenview; Copy with K3b; Open with VLC media player. For the latter, Device Notifier gives me nine options: Open with File Manager; Copy with k9copy; Rip Video DVD Titles with K3b; Play DVD with Kaffeine; Open with VLC media player; Open with Video Player (Dragon Play...); Copy with k9copy (wizard); Download Photos with Gwenview; Copy with K3b.

[Fitzcarraldo]

OK, finally got a DavMail icon in the System Tray on the Panel. The davmail.png icons that I scaled using the GIMP and copied into the various hicolor and oxygen icon directories (see a post on 15 February) didn't solve the problem, so today I imported a 64x64 davmail.png icon into Inkscape and used Path > Trace Bitmap... | Colors | Scans 256 to create a SVG icon. It's not very good-looking, but fine for the size of icon required for the System Tray. I then copied it to the relevant icon directory:

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cp /home/fitzcarraldo/Desktop/davmail.svg /usr/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/apps/

I logged out and logged in again, and I now how a DavMail icon in the System Tray.

Actually, I've discovered just how difficult it is to try to convert a PNG (or JPG, or BMP etc.) to SVG. I also tried ImageMagick and AutoTrace but the results were poor. The result using Inkscape is better but far from perfect, and it seems the only way to get a decent result is to do it manually. The DavMail icon is actually very simple, so I am surprised at how difficult ImageMagick, AutoTrace and Inkscape find it:



Anyway, I'm reasonably happy at the moment. KDE 4.6.0 has been stable for the last few days and I now have all the icons on the Panel that were there with KDE 4.5.4. KDE 4.6.0 is definitely slower than KDE 4.5.4, though. It is not as snappy in use, and start up is noticeably longer than with KDE 4.5.4. I'm hoping 4.6.1 improves things.

EDIT (Mon Feb 21 21:35:46 GMT 2011): In the end I also had to do the following, over and above the other copying mentioned above and in a previous post:

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cp /home/fitzcarraldo/Desktop/davmail256.png /usr/share/icons/hicolor/256x256/apps/davmail.png
cp /home/fitzcarraldo/Desktop/davmail256.png /usr/share/icons/oxygen/256x256/apps/davmail.png
cp /home/fitzcarraldo/Desktop/davmail128.png /usr/share/icons/oxygen/128x128/apps/davmail.png
cp /home/fitzcarraldo/Desktop/davmail128.png /usr/share/icons/hicolor/128x128/apps/davmail.png
cp /home/fitzcarraldo/Desktop/davmail24.png /usr/share/icons/hicolor/24x24/apps/davmail.png

[raman]

So Fitz portage version of KDe 4.6.0 have less known issues, in example wrote on this forum, then Entropy version?
What I want to say is, that all your hard work was worth and better than use Entropy version? What do you think?
And I agree, 4.6 is heavier, is starting slower, I think the some reason of this, are bugs on 4.6, something like not perfectly connected puzzles and some parts are bite each other.

[Fitzcarraldo]

Well, raman, that's a bit like comparing apples and oranges really, because my main laptop has several different packages and several different versions of packages to those in the Entropy repository, as I don't have Entropy installed on this particular laptop. I haven't upgraded my nettop, which does use Entropy, to KDE 4.6.0 and I probably won't bother now; I'll wait for 4.6.1 given what I've experienced with KDE 4.6.0. But, to try to answer your question, I suspect my result via Portage is no better than the result would have been with Entropy, because I believe the problems I experienced are down to KDE 4.6.0 itself. The problems I experienced with the Fusion Icon and DavMail icons, for example, are because those applications were not created with KDE's Plasma Desktop in mind, so I expect I would have had to do the same irrespective of whether I had used Portage or Entropy to upgrade to KDE 4.6.0. I believe my problem with KDE 4.6.0 freezing at the hard disk icon on the KDE splash screen was also due to some KDE setting of mine that KDE 4.6.0 couldn't handle, hence my deleting of all the KDE config files allowed it to start up. I haven't mentioned it so far, but I can't use the Smooth Tasks widget in KDE 4.6.0, although it worked perfectly for me in KDE 4.5.4. If I try to install the Smooth Tasks widget on the Panel in KDE 4.6.0 then I lose the Panel completely, so I gave up trying to use it. I'll try again in KDE 4.6.1. I think your analogy of not-quite-meshing (jigsaw?) puzzles 'biting' each other is probably correct. I'm willing to bet that these will be cleaned up in 4.6.1.

[timothyRlamora]

I used entropy to install kde 4.6.0 and yses I hope they get things fixed in 4.6.1, it is slower and seems a bit bloated but for me it works and I can still do some of the same things I could in 4.5.4 which I liked better.