Ok, sorry about the topic.. I couldn't resist. (for those that don't know - (almost) every app in KDE starts with K).

So... You downloaded and installed Deblet (you know.. that totally awesome debian for your tablet?) and you saw the great post made by b-man and your first thought was "Gosh.. that's cool and all... but I want my KDE!".

Well.. here you go (I assume you are root for all commands listed):


Are you someone who wants stuff to just work ??? Don't want to deal with bugs or quirks and report them to the developer(s)? Then normally KDE 3.5.9 would be for you. It is the 'stable' KDE version. Unfortunately; and I will warn you now - KDE was not designed for a screen this small..and this really gets in the way. But that won't stop you now, will it?

First things first...we need to prepare our debian's apt for getting KDE.. so the file you want to edit (use your faorite editor; vim, nano, emacs, whatever) is /etc/apt/sources.list. If you accepted all the defaults during Deblet's installation (or you don't know what SID is..) then you have lenny - and you MAY be good to go... but check anyway:

Lenny
SID -for those that enjoy the unknown...
Now that apt has some new repositories to get all our goodies from...

Woohoo! More programs! Ok.. moving on:

For BIG KDE
Wow that was long, eh? Yeah... kde in debian doesn't have an 'easy' all-in-one package like gnome.. But kdebase does get most of it... I just added missing pieces. This will take approximately 409 MB of space. This will also install Samba for you; and it will ask (during installation) for a SAMBA config like WORKGROUP, and whether you want samba to pull WINS information from DHCP... this is windows stuff; if you don't know what it is - accept defaults.. if you do; you'll know what you need to answer .

For baby KDE
Whew.... that was easier.. and will only take a whopping 216MB (or so) of space! Of course the downside... the easy network tools didn't load for these - so network setup will be more difficult.

Now we wait.... When it is done you may see an error while installing a package called 'fam'. If so this is fine.. the start/stop daemon didn't work because the system isn't fully booted. Before we fix this we need to first fix KDM so those without a keyboard can see their desktop!

The file we are looking for is:
/etc/kde3/kdm/kdmrc

Now this file is HUGE... therefore I won't cause an already insane post to be longer... these are JUST the changes:

Note: Changes are bolded. All these options are IN THE FILE ALREADY... you do not need to add any of them.. just find them and change them. Replace the "user" with the name of your Deblet user. Remove any # signs at the beginning of the line of these values.

Reboot your tablet and you should get directly into KDE - you will know because KDE launches a 'Setup Wizard' (n800 users see the big red note on the bottom)

Now once you are fully booted you need to open a 'Konsole" window and run the command:
This will finalize the installation of that package now that /dev/pts is available. (you won't get this error if you used qole's Debian Chroot to initially get to your debian in maemo; because he mounts the /dev/ devices for you.)

And thats it for KDE 3.5.9 .... Enjoy.

Warning N800 users: Even tho we bypassed the kdm login.. KDE still launches a "Setup Wizard" the first time a user logs into kde. You can click the X to close it.


First.. let me make this clear... I recommend you do not install KDE 4.1.0 on your tablet. It is slow, bulky and just a pain to use. It took me 3-5 minutes to launch the built-in file manager Dolphin.. and unlike OpenOffice that works once it's loaded; it still took half a minute just to click on anything inside the dolphin. It's just slow. BUT - If you must.. then you will be needing My Apt Repository. You will also need to add the experimental repository to /etc/apt/sources.list
Once that is added it should be as simple as
Your kde4 file to edit will be in /etc/kde4/kdm/kdmrc I believe and the options will be the same as above. Other kde4 optional packages are:

So How is it?

Ok; I was a little harsh on KDE and I'm starting to warm up to it now that I am going through all the threads here

Qole thought Gnome's Dialogs were bad? AT LEAST screen rotation woks right. I have attached a screenshot of the screwup KDE does. The task bar; if left on the bottom covers half the screen. So you have to put the bar on either side or the top. AND to top it off the wallpaper doesn't rotate with you!!!

Now.. none of the screens in KDE fit our tiny tablet either - but a nifty trick in KDE is if you hold down the Menu key (the top one on the left side of the screen on an n810) while dragging a window - it will move the whole window... this allows you to view the entire configuration screens without messing with rotation.

Also.... if you haven't been following along then you may have missed the cool trick about GTK... add the following to your /home/user/.xsessionrc file and right click will work for GTK applications.
And make sure it is installed:
Now.. Gnome is entirely built on Gtk; so this hack effectively enables right click for all normal Gnome apps;and many third party GTK apps... BUT...KDE is based on QT... and I have not yet found a hack like this for QT; which essentially means that none of the KDE apps have a right click. (however; GTK apps like epiphany will still work).

On the other hand.. Penguinbait - being the awesome dude he is has provided a script that should hopefully allow right clicking in KDE.. I have yet to try it and will update when I do. While I still prefer not to have to click a button to change my mouse every time; at least the functionality exists.. so I'll be happy with what I can get.

I still get very annoyed that the wallpaper does not resize when you rotate.. half your screen is just empty space; it's usable - but no wallpaper is on it. I have pm'd penguinbait to see if he has made any other changes to his KDE version on Maemo.. My ultimate goal is to help you setup Debian's KDE to function pretty much exactly like Maemo's KDE.. that way you can have KDE on both; with no learning curve!

Special Thanks: The entire Deblet Team for their awesome work on the Debian OS side of the house. B-man for the motivation to do this. Qole for his input and knowledge; and Bensen and Qole for their chroot scripts and environment. Also Penguinbait for the easy to use DEB's on dual booting and cloning; and all of the KDE work he is doing. And you.. for reading this ridiculously long message .

You may want to indicate that apt sources are set up already usually but maybe document the structure as to add 'experimental' and such - so people don't blindly add additional mirrors and confuse apt

The default sources.list that deblet provides is only (for sid):

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian sid main

which leaves a LOT to be desired...default debian provides a lot more repositories than just main. Adding contrib and non-free should not be detrimental and provides access to a good number of new software..

You're right that experimental is a bad idea but you DO have to say -t experimental before apt will even try to load it.. and since I haven't gotten to 4.1 yet that section still needs documentation.

Sweet!!, congratulations man, The next time i re-install deblet i will definitely try this out!

Well... it does not appear 4.1 will be available soon; there are several dependency packages that have not been put into the armel repositories... a good example is kwrite... if you scroll to the bottom it will show you available architectures .... i dont even see arm on many of these... so... while its not impossible - it would require building a good number of dependencies from source. I will keep looking into it but I dont foresee an easy way to do this until someone that is good at making .deb files comes along and ports these missing dependencies to armel.

I did follow all the way through the 3.5.9 setup and it should wok perfectly.. any problems feel free to ask... I will update the 4.1 section when it is possible to do it an 'easy way'.

I may have spoke too soon... as soon as I hit the 'submit' button I remember apt allows you build source packages on the fly... and kwrite and the others I was looking at are available in the source repo's.... I'm running a complete apt-get -t experimental -b source on all the kde packages now.. i expect this to take some time.. will post when it's done.

If there's no Debian package for an architecture, there's usually a good reason

I don't expect your build-from-source technique to work; on the other hand, if it does, that would rock. I should just give xmame-sdl a try that way to see if I can get it building...

Well.. it tooke 18 hours to build kdebase-workspace on that blasted tablet LOL. But it finished just now.. I ran a dpkg -i on them and still have dependency problems (even though the compiles worked fine?) ..

So I still have some trackign down to do... I suspect I may end up having my own copy of every kde4 deb from scratch that I'll have to upload to get kde4 to work with these tablets.

Feel like hosting for me?

Just an Update (not that this thread has really generated any interest.. and this is probably all a huge collossal waste of time )..

I finally got kdebase-workspace 4.1 completely installed and all it's dependencies with no problems.. (had to compile the entire kdebase-workspace from sources).

Now I am working on kdebase itself.

kdebase-runtime is already installed when kdebase-workspace worked correctly.

that will give the whole "kde4-minimal" package and the very basics of the kde4 system to being functional.. then I'll start working on all the extras.. like kdegames, kdemultimedia, etc.

Looking through the repo's I'm going to have to be compiling a bunch of those as well... this will take a very long time to get a complete KDE 4.1.. Definitely going to need hosting space..

Does anyone know how to setup an apt-repo?? maybe we can make our own "itT" apt repo and things like penguinbaits deb's, qole's deb's, etc could all be put inside of it..

Ok.. updated the OP... I finally got the components for kde4-minimal compiled and installed and they all "work"... but I didn't hot link them for two reasons:
A) This thread hasn't really generated any interest
and
B) The 4.1 KDE just isn't very usable on our 400mhz ARM. Everything moves so slow... and this is WITH 600mb swap and the 128mb internal RAM... Dolphin took over 4 minutes for me to load it all the way.. and then just clicking on "details" instead of "icons" took 30 seconds to a minute for the screen to update.

It sure is 'pretty'... although I don't like that they are moving towards some kind of red headed step-child cross between MAC OS X and Vista... but some of the graphics are really quite nice.

But what good is a spiffy looking desktop that doesn't do anything?