MX-14: Advanced: KDE

Note: RC=right click
See also the detailed video MX-14 with KDE
Installation
The basic installation is very simple.
- Install MX-14 -- bare bones with nothing added.
- After rebooting from the HDD, open the MX Package Installer application.
- Select KDE_Standard; if you want more control, install KDE Light.
- Wait for all of the packages to be downloaded and installed. Time required will depend on Internet speeds.
- Reboot, and a KDE option will appear on the log-in screen.
- Run the MX-14 system tools, like disk-manager, MX codecs installer, and MX flash installer.
- Install the appropriate video driver using smxi or whatever method you prefer.
- Network Manager is present, but not visible in the KDE System Tray. This is resolved by installing plasma-widget-networkmanager.
- Go through the inventory of installed applications and install the ones that are missing (there may be quite a few of them).
Almost all the tweaking will consist of things always done to a new installation anyway, like setting up the panel, installing a different mouse cursor arrow, and setting up compositing features and changing window appearances in System Settings. The resulting KDE desktop will be very generic, featuring plain grey KDE wallpaper with stripes running diagonally. Also, the KDE version installed by the meta-installer is a couple of versions older than the current version of KDE.
Customization
There are many items provided by a standard KDE installation that have to be done manually.
- The "delete" action isn't enabled automatically in Dolphin
- There is no easy super-user mode for Dolphin. But it is easy to create a launcher on the panel or desktop with the command
gksu dolphin
- There won't be a trash can on the desktop -- you have to add a trash can as a widget.
- You may be very disappointed with the graphics rendering OOTB for gtk applications. This may need some work. If you use the oxygen theme, be sure that both gtk2-engines-oxygen and gtk3-engines-oxygen are installed and be sure to select oxygen-gtk in System Settings > Application Appearance > GTK > GTK Themes. Not all the gtk packages that are required are installed with the KDE-standard meta package, so you'll have to follow up with installing them yourself.
- You may also be very disappointed in the quality of the fonts OOTB. You may see a noticeable improvement by changing the default anti-aliasing setting in System Settings > Application Appearance > Fonts to "slight" and by applying a Force Fonts DPI setting to 120. I've also gotten nice results by using the Ubuntu fonts for all the default fonts and using larger default font sizes.
- Remove kdesudo if it's installed. Removing kdesudo will force applications doing root actions to ask for the root password, as they should, instead of allowing root actions to occur with the user password.
- For folks who installed video drivers using nvidia-install: to get the most recent drivers compatible with your NVidia GPUs, add this to your repository list:
deb http://packages-siduction.org/fixes/ unstable non-free
Apt-notifier will notify you of any updates to the packages installed with nvidia-install.
- For all users with NVidia GPUs: When making a snapshot of your system be sure to edit /usr/lib/snapshot-mx/snapshot-exlude.list and comment out the following lines:
#- etc/X11/xorg.conf
#- etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-nvidia.conf
Unless one of those two files is in your snapshot, you'll be stuck on the CLI following boot-up and you won't be able to start X from the CLI.
- The F12 hotkey for ejecting the CD/DVD may not work OOTB. To fix that go to System Settings > Shortcuts and Gestures > Edit > New > Global Shortcut > Command/URL > Trigger and assign F12 to the command
eject -T
. You'll get a complaint that this conflicts with another action, but you can safely ignore that. With this setting F12 will open the CD/DVD tray if it's closed and close it if it's open.
- You may find a bug in Device Notifier that opens the wrong applications when clicking on default actions. Some users have found that clicking on the File Manager action after plugging in a USB device opened ShowFoto instead of Dolphin. Changing the Device Notifier settings or System Settings did not correct this as long as ShowFoto was installed. You should be able to fix this bug by editing /usr/share/kde4/apps/solid/actions/test-predicate-openwindow.desktop file, changing this line:
Exec=kioclient exec %f
to this:
Exec=/usr/bin/dolphin %f
If you have similar miscues with other device actions, delve into /usr/share/kde4/apps/solid/actions/ folder, look for the controlling file, and change the Exec=xxxx line accordingly.
One final strong recommendation. People who use the plain-vanilla KDE can simply do a fresh installation from the Live Media when things go sideways on their systems, but that isn't an option here. Since installing MX-14/KDE is a two-step process, it's highly recommended to make back-up partition images of / and /home when you're finished.
Help
For other information about using KDE on MX-14, there is a special KDE subforum where you can post questions or browse through topics.