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KDE 4 Sessions

By randomguy3

So: you’ve installed KDE 4 under the kde-devel user (following the instructions at TechBase). Now you want to try out KDE 4 in all its glory, but as your main user. Well, here’s how.

First of all, we’ll need a script that sets up the environment and starts KDE 4. /home/kde-devel/kde/bin/startkde does most of this, of course, but it expects some things set up first, like PATH. To this end, we’ll set up a couple of bash functions that give us a KDE environment. Create a file /home/kde-devel/bin/startkde4 with the following contents:

#!/bin/bash

# startkde4

function removefrom()
{
    local varname=$1
    local entry="$2"

    unset newvar
    for value in `IFS=: eval echo \\$$varname`; do
	if [ "$value" != "$entry" ]; then
	    newvar="${newvar}${newvar+:}${value}"
	fi
    done

    # Set it again
    eval $varname="$newvar"
    unset newvar
}

if [ -n "$QTDIR" ]; then
    removefrom PATH $QTDIR/bin
    removefrom LD_LIBRARY_PATH $QTDIR/lib
    removefrom PKG_CONFIG_PATH $QTDIR/lib
    removefrom MANPATH $QTDIR/man
fi

export QTDIR=/home/kde-devel/build/qt-copy
export PATH=$QTDIR/bin:$PATH
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$QTDIR/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=$QTDIR/lib:$PKG_CONFIG_PATH
export MANPATH=$MANPATH:$QTDIR/man
export QMAKESPEC=$QTDIR/mkspecs/linux-g++

# Remove the current KDE from variables
if [ -n "$KDEDIR" ]; then
    removefrom PATH $KDEDIR/bin
    removefrom LD_LIBRARY_PATH $KDEDIR/lib
    removefrom PKG_CONFIG_PATH $KDEDIR/lib/pkgconfig
fi

# Add the new one
export KDEDIR=/home/kde-devel/kde
export KDEDIRS=$KDEDIR
export KDEHOME=$HOME/.kde4
export KDETMP=${TMPDIR-/tmp}/kde4-$USER
export KDEVARTMP=/var/tmp/kde4cache-$USER
export KDE_DATA_DIRS=$KDEDIR/share
export PATH=$KDEDIR/bin:$PATH
export XDG_CONFIG_DIRS=$KDEDIR/etc/xdg
export QT_PLUGIN_PATH=$KDEDIR/lib/plugins
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$KDEDIR/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=$KDEDIR/lib/pkgconfig:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
export KDE_COLOR_DEBUG=1

# Ensure that they exist
mkdir -p $KDEDIR $KDETMP $KDEVARTMP

exec /home/kde-devel/kde/bin/startkde

Of course, you can turn most of this file into a bash function called kde4 and place it into your ~/.bashrc, then turn your terminal into a place to run kde4 apps from (in your kde3/gnome/whatever session) by typing “kde4″ at the prompt.

Now make sure it’s executable (chmod +x /home/kde-devel/bin/startkde4).

Finally, we need a session for KDE4. In /etc/X11, there should be a folder called sessions. This should contain kde.desktop. You can copy this to kde4.desktop and edit it to look like the following (ie: change the Name, Exec and TryExec):

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Type=XSession
Exec=/home/kde-devel/bin/startkde4
TryExec=/home/kde-devel/bin/startkde4
Name=KDE4
Comment=The K Desktop Environment. A powerful Open Source graphical desktop environment

Now you should be able to select “KDE4″ as the session type in KDM and log in to a KDE 4 session.

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

This entry was posted on 25th October 2007 at 11:15 pm and is filed under KDE. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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