Date: Mon, 15 Dec 1997 20:19:59 +1100 (EST) From: Andrew Kenneth Milton <akm@mother.sneaker.net.au> To: jtroy@goof.com Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: KDE port problems Message-ID: <199712150920.UAA00962@mother.sneaker.net.au> In-Reply-To: <19971215054333.599.qmail@goof.com> from "jtroy@goof.com" at Dec 15, 97 00:43:33 am
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
+-----[ jtroy@goof.com ]------------------------------
First my disclaimer:- I'm running this under a 3.0 SNAP...
Kde isn't very mature, but, it is possible to get it to work...
|
| I found /usr/local/bin/kdm. I assumed this was some sort of display
| manager (analagous to xdm) so I shut down XDM and started KDM. When I start
| KDM I see the Accelerated X's giant X appear on my screen as I normall do when
| my X server is started. However, nothing happens after that....I don't get
| any sort of log in screen. The X just stays on the screen and I have to kill
| the server manually to get rid of it.
kdm uses wait differently to the way it works under FreeBSD. Basically
it's sitting there waiting for a child process that's already gone.
Once it's working it's kind of cute. I can get it to work with every
other windowmanager other than kde. You can setup the background thing
to put flashy backgrounds in behind the login screen, and if you have
pretty pictures of people logging in you can drop those into a directory
and they just have to click on their own face (unless they have some sort
of right-brain problem and can't recognise faces) or type as per usual.
My basic advice here, is stick with xdm, until the kdm stuff works better.
| Now, I don't know if I am even following the right procedure to use
| KDE by starting kdm, and I also don't know if there is anything else I need
| to do to get it to work, but I would appreciate any help/advice from anyone
| who has played with this port. Thanks to you in advance,
There is always still a lot of code hacking to be done to even get it
to compile and link. It's not really stable, the whole thing will
crash out if certain apps (e.g. xfmail) crash. This has been claimed to have
been fixed after Beta-2.
This is definitely not something for the inexperienced to play with.
I've been running KDE for 3 or 4 months now as my regular 'environment'.
I'm happy to deal with the bugs. It is memory hungry, and versions prior
to Beta-2 are very slow. You periodically have to cull all of the screensaver
processes that suddenly appear.
You probably also want to kill off the kbgndwm unless you *really* want
background images. It also uses a lot of colours so 256 colour modes will
probably look poor, it doesn't seem to have the colour allocation
tool that CDE has to let you determine how many colours the desktop
should have.
There is a /usr/local/kde/bin/startkde (I don't know where the port
sticks it, I don't use the port). That will show you what needs to be
started, or you can use it as your 'window manager' and it should
start all the things you need. The audioserver will crash on startup
leaving corefiles, so best to remove that from the startkde script
(I've fixed it not to leave corefiles, but, it still doesn't work, and
I'm not that desperate to have 'zoom' noises played when I open windows)
I still like olvwm and afterstep, somewhere between the two would do me
nicely. Something else for me to add to my approaching infinitely long
'todo' list.
--
,-_|\ SneakerNet | Andrew Milton | GSM: +61(41)6 022 411
/ \ P.O. Box 154 | akm@sneaker.net.au | Fax: +61(2) 9746 8233
\_,-._/ N Strathfield +--+----------------------+---+ Ph: +61(2) 9746 8233
v NSW 2137 | Low cost Internet Solutions |
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?199712150920.UAA00962>