[gentoo-amd64] Re: Obligatory KDE4 question.

[Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@cox.net>]

BRM <bm_witness@yahoo.com> posted
434429.3348.qm@web65410.mail.ac4.yahoo.com, excerpted below, on  Thu, 13
Mar 2008 13:46:40 -0700:

> I'm interested to hear, however, how easy it is for those of us that
> login on the command line instead of the GUI. Should be as simple as
> re-pointing the xinitrc file for the individual user, no?

I did/do the command-line login thing.  I used the same user for both 
KDE3 and KDE4.  In theory, the script is supposed to take the ~/.kde 
symlink and point it at the right profile (~/.kde3.5 or .kde.svn or the 
4.x version, whatever it is).  In fact, I had some issues with that due 
to my customized setup (I have and use ~/kde*, without the . hiding the 
dirs, normally, tho .kde* exists and points to the same places, and some 
of my temp and cache dir stuff is pointed at customized locations), but 
it worked well enough once I understood what they were doing and created 
my own starter scripts to do the same thing to my customized dirs.

So as long as each computer user account uses only one of the KDEs, and 
as long as you've not customized the user's profile or temp dirs, there 
should be no issues in that regard.  If you have customized but use 
separate users, I'm assuming you're advanced enough to resolve the 
customization issues with a script as I did and there shouldn't be 
anything major.  If you use the same user, things can get a bit complex 
with settings from one showing up but not doing what's expected in the 
other, and this gets MORE complex if you've customized user KDE locations 
a bit, but it's still workable, with some patience.  The worst problem I 
had was losing my KDE3 kmail account settings when KDE4 kmail started 
instead due to mixed-up paths.  Fortunately, I had backups, and was able 
to restore a working file without having to re-setup all my mail accounts 
manually.

So keep to a different user for kde4 testing and don't customize his kde 
and temp locations, and all should be well.  If you use the same user, 
expect some complexity, but it can be managed if you've been cautious and 
done your backups before testing, and know bash and remember enough about 
your customized locations to get each one pointed correctly as 
necessary.  Really, the separate user testing is the way to go at this 
point, but stubborn folks like me prefer doing it the hard way!

The deal breaker here wasn't that, it was simply that huge swaths of 
functionality from 3.x are still missing in 4.x, as I mentioned in an 
earlier post.  If you aren't the seriously customizing type, you'll 
probably be fine, but then I can't really see why you'd be interested in 
being so far out front on KDE4, either.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

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