Slackware 13.0 - KDE4

[Terry]

I finally decided to do the upgrade on my laptop and it turned out ok, but I found KDE-4.2.4 a little rough around the edges on this system, not bad but just a few things that were not working as well as it should. For one thing, the window decorations were intermittently skewed at the top. It may have had something to do with the upgrade procedure, I usually just backup /home and restore after a fresh install and I didn't do that this time. At any rate, I heard there were significant improvements in KDE-4.3 and since we can apparently go to 4.3.1 without having to upgrade to -current I thought I'd try it. The end result seems pretty nice, there are a number of improvements and new features, an overall cleaner and neater look and feel, I highly recommend KDE-4.3.1 and the upgrade is fairly easy.

Just do:

lftp -c 'open http://cardinal.lizella.net/~vbatts/kde ... 4.3.1/x86/ ; mirror KDE-upgrade'

which will download above files to new directory: KDE-upgrade/
Now kill X and upgrade the packages:

# telinit 3
# cd /home/terry/KDE-upgrade ; upgradepkg -install-new --reinstall *.txz

and reboot.

I now see that some have recommended that we rm -rf .kde or mv .kde .kde~ so that fresh new .kde directory and corresponding files may be created which might avoid loading old kde configurations that may not be compatible. I didn't do that and the only thing I found that I didn't like was a window that appeared on 1/4 of the desktop background displaying icons and files contained in ~/Desktop. Patrick showed me how to get rid of that [which was embarrassingly simple - thanks Patrick], but other than that, I had no other problems.

[For future use]: I moved KDE-upgrade/ to my 8G thumb drive and since it happens to be the same one I have slackware-13.0/slackware on and since I always just install from the thumb-drive anyway, I could replace the 4.2 files in slackware-13.0/slackeware/kde/ with these new 4.3.1 files and my next 13.0 install will already have KDE-4.3.1 ...not sure that I'll do that but maybe...
At any rate, I thought I'd share my little excursion with KDE.

PS. If you have a 64 bit system,
http://cardinal.lizella.net/~vbatts/kde ... .1/x86_64/
is for you.
*Thanks Vincent Batts for providing KDE-4.3.1 files online.

[Terry]

I later found that when I ran OpenOffice, I had similar window distortion, See: http://picasaweb.google.com/trryhend/Wi ... 6050644658 I actually did some serious research and found that it is not the fault of KDE, but the Intel driver module I was using. At first I was using xf86-video-intel-2.8.0 (which apparently installed by default). I tried xf86-video-intel-2.8.1 which did the same thing. I backed down to xf86-video-intel-2.5.1 and all is well. (Which is all I really needed to do in the first place to actually fix the problem.)

I found the alternate Intel packages in extra/xf86-video-intel-alternate/ I went from 2.8.0 to 2.8.1 and then tried 2.5.1 and it works fine so I'm leaving it there.

All is well that ends well. Life is good, Linux is free