Switching between KDE and GNOME

Switching between KDE and GNOME

[Dan Zlotnikov]

Hello everyone, and good morning where appropriate.

I'm currently running GNOME/Sawfish, but have decided to switch to KDE.
This is proving to be somewhat beyond me. Can anyone point me in the right
direction with some really short steps and using two-syllable words at
most?

Running Debian/Woody kernel 2.4.1

Thanks!

Dan


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Re: Switching between KDE and GNOME

[Flemming Greve Skovengaard]

Dan Zlotnikov wrote:
> Hello everyone, and good morning where appropriate.
> 
> I'm currently running GNOME/Sawfish, but have decided to switch to KDE.
> This is proving to be somewhat beyond me. Can anyone point me in the right
> direction with some really short steps and using two-syllable words at
> most?
> 
> Running Debian/Woody kernel 2.4.1
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> Dan
> 
> 
> -
> To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-newbie" in
> the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
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> 
> .
> 
If you already have KDE installed you can run 'xwmconfig'.
You can now choose xinitrc.kde (if you have KDE installed).
If you don't have KDE installed, I can't help (not yet anyway).

-- 
Flemming Greve Skovengaard               Man still has one belief,
a.k.a Greven                             One decree that stands alone
<dsl58893@vip.cybercity.dk>              The laying down of arms
4168.08 BogoMIPS                         Is like cancer to their bones

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Re: Switching between KDE and GNOME

[Ray Olszewski]

I don't run either KDE or Gnome here, so I can help only a little with the 
DEbian parts.

Assuming you are using the apt-* tools for package management, you probably 
want to apt-get install kdebase . (At least this is right for Sid; Woody is 
probably the same in this respect.) If its installer is any good, it will 
either ask appropriate questions to get you to replace Gnome with KDE, or 
it will do so without asking (less likely but possible). Once the base 
stuff is installed, you'll need to install appropriate specific 
applications for kde.

This procedure will leave all the Gnome and Sawfish stuff on you hard disk 
(good thing too, since you are quite likely to be running apps that use the 
GTK libraries), but will probably work to get rid of them as X defaults. If 
not, once you have the Debian part handled, anyone who knows Gnome and KDE 
should be able to help you with further specifics.

BTW, I really hope you are not running kernel 2.4.1 ... you are more likely 
to be running 2.4.19 or 2.4.20, if your installation is reasonably current 
and you remembered to update from the limited installer kernel.

At 06:55 PM 6/30/2003 +0200, Flemming Greve Skovengaard wrote:
>Dan Zlotnikov wrote:
>>Hello everyone, and good morning where appropriate.
>>I'm currently running GNOME/Sawfish, but have decided to switch to KDE.
>>This is proving to be somewhat beyond me. Can anyone point me in the right
>>direction with some really short steps and using two-syllable words at
>>most?
>>Running Debian/Woody kernel 2.4.1
>>Thanks!
>>Dan
[...]

>If you already have KDE installed you can run 'xwmconfig'.
>You can now choose xinitrc.kde (if you have KDE installed).
>If you don't have KDE installed, I can't help (not yet anyway).




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Re: Switching between KDE and GNOME

[Dan Zlotnikov]

> If you already have KDE installed you can run 'xwmconfig'.
> You can now choose xinitrc.kde (if you have KDE installed).
> If you don't have KDE installed, I can't help (not yet anyway).

xwmconfig? It doesn't appear to exist. Is that distro/x-server specific?
I'm running gdm, BTW.

Thanks,

Dan

>
> --
> Flemming Greve Skovengaard               Man still has one belief,
> a.k.a Greven                             One decree that stands alone
> <dsl58893@vip.cybercity.dk>              The laying down of arms
> 4168.08 BogoMIPS                         Is like cancer to their bones
>

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Re: Switching between KDE and GNOME

[Dan Zlotnikov]

First of all, D'oh! 2.4.19, of course. Typoed.


On Mon, 30 Jun 2003, Ray Olszewski wrote:

> I don't run either KDE or Gnome here, so I can help only a little with the
> DEbian parts.
>
> Assuming you are using the apt-* tools for package management, you probably
> want to apt-get install kdebase . (At least this is right for Sid; Woody is
> probably the same in this respect.) If its installer is any good, it will
> either ask appropriate questions to get you to replace Gnome with KDE, or
> it will do so without asking (less likely but possible). Once the base
> stuff is installed, you'll need to install appropriate specific
> applications for kde.

I installed kde, which is the dummy package with dependencies taking care
of the entire gamut of kde apps. However, the nice thing isn't happening;
no config-apps starting up automatically. I'm somewhat confused where KDE
fits in the whole display manager/desktop environment/window manager
structure, so I don't know where it should be called from.

Thanks for the help!

Dan


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Re: Switching between KDE and GNOME

[cr]

On Tuesday 01 July 2003 08:51, Dan Zlotnikov wrote:
> First of all, D'oh! 2.4.19, of course. Typoed.
>
> On Mon, 30 Jun 2003, Ray Olszewski wrote:
> > I don't run either KDE or Gnome here, so I can help only a little with
> > the DEbian parts.
> >
> > Assuming you are using the apt-* tools for package management, you
> > probably want to apt-get install kdebase . (At least this is right for
> > Sid; Woody is probably the same in this respect.) If its installer is any
> > good, it will either ask appropriate questions to get you to replace
> > Gnome with KDE, or it will do so without asking (less likely but
> > possible). Once the base stuff is installed, you'll need to install
> > appropriate specific
> > applications for kde.

For what it's worth, I installed kdebase a week or so ago.    And bingo!, 
without so much as asking me, KDE took over.    Next time I logged in my 
screen looked like a jukebox.   (Sorry to any who *like* KDE's default 
settings  :).

(About two weeks ago I installed Debian 3.0, and somehow (blame Debian's 
installer! :)  kdebase got missed out.   I had all the other KDE apps like 
Kmail etc, though I 'always' run Gnome as a desktop.   But I noticed that 
Kaddressbook was missing, so I installed kdebase (using kpackage as the 
installer).      

I guess, if you're running Gnome, you may find Gnome-apt will do it, though 
I've never tried it.   Anyway, there are a number of associated KDE packages 
which you might want to install.   I would hope Gnome-apt would prompt for or
let you search for any such packages.

The way to swap from one to the other, I found, is to make 
/etc/alternatives/x-session-manager a symlink to either /usr/bin/kde2  or  
/usr/bin/gnome-session.    

ln -s /usr/bin/gnome-session /etc/alternatives/x-session-manager

Well, it worked for me anyway.  

cr
... very much a Debian newbie
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Re: Switching between KDE and GNOME

[Flemming Greve Skovengaard]

Dan Zlotnikov wrote:
>>If you already have KDE installed you can run 'xwmconfig'.
>>You can now choose xinitrc.kde (if you have KDE installed).
>>If you don't have KDE installed, I can't help (not yet anyway).
> 
> 
> xwmconfig? It doesn't appear to exist. Is that distro/x-server specific?
> I'm running gdm, BTW.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Dan
> 
> 
>>--
>>Flemming Greve Skovengaard               Man still has one belief,
>>a.k.a Greven                             One decree that stands alone
>><dsl58893@vip.cybercity.dk>              The laying down of arms
>>4168.08 BogoMIPS                         Is like cancer to their bones
>>
> 
> 
> -
> To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-newbie" in
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> Please read the FAQ at http://www.linux-learn.org/faqs
> 
> .
> 
It should be a part of the X11 disto (mine is located in /usr/X11R6/bin).
All it really does is to create a symlink xinitrc to a xinitrc.* file
in /etc/X11/xinit.

P.S. Uups, I just read the man page for xwmconfig.
It is made by Patrick J. Volkerding, who is a major Slackware-contributor,
so it might be Slackware-specific. Sorry.

-- 
Flemming Greve Skovengaard               Just a few small tears between
a.k.a Greven                             Someone happy and one sad
<dsl58893@vip.cybercity.dk>              Just a thin line drawn between
4168.08 BogoMIPS                         Being a genius or insane

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Re: Switching between KDE and GNOME

[Dan Zlotnikov]

This is the most bizarre thing that's happened yet. I tried startkde from
a text-term and it died. Trying to switch to the KDE wm from inside GNOME
tended to hang up the x-session. Then, all of a sudden (must've been some
bloody slow process in the background), KDE goes active on me. I'm not
seeing any GNOME processes through ps -aux, it's all KDE now.

Problem: Any attempt to access the drive is exceedingly slow. I'm talking
about three minutes to load the /home filelist in Konqueror sort of slow.
Something isn't working right, and I'll be damned if I knew what.

Dan

On Tue, 1 Jul 2003, cr wrote:

> On Tuesday 01 July 2003 08:51, Dan Zlotnikov wrote:
> > First of all, D'oh! 2.4.19, of course. Typoed.
> >
> > On Mon, 30 Jun 2003, Ray Olszewski wrote:
> > > I don't run either KDE or Gnome here, so I can help only a little with
> > > the DEbian parts.
> > >
> > > Assuming you are using the apt-* tools for package management, you
> > > probably want to apt-get install kdebase . (At least this is right for
> > > Sid; Woody is probably the same in this respect.) If its installer is any
> > > good, it will either ask appropriate questions to get you to replace
> > > Gnome with KDE, or it will do so without asking (less likely but
> > > possible). Once the base stuff is installed, you'll need to install
> > > appropriate specific
> > > applications for kde.
>
> For what it's worth, I installed kdebase a week or so ago.    And bingo!,
> without so much as asking me, KDE took over.    Next time I logged in my
> screen looked like a jukebox.   (Sorry to any who *like* KDE's default
> settings  :).
>
> (About two weeks ago I installed Debian 3.0, and somehow (blame Debian's
> installer! :)  kdebase got missed out.   I had all the other KDE apps like
> Kmail etc, though I 'always' run Gnome as a desktop.   But I noticed that
> Kaddressbook was missing, so I installed kdebase (using kpackage as the
> installer).
>
> I guess, if you're running Gnome, you may find Gnome-apt will do it, though
> I've never tried it.   Anyway, there are a number of associated KDE packages
> which you might want to install.   I would hope Gnome-apt would prompt for or
> let you search for any such packages.
>
> The way to swap from one to the other, I found, is to make
> /etc/alternatives/x-session-manager a symlink to either /usr/bin/kde2  or
> /usr/bin/gnome-session.
>
> ln -s /usr/bin/gnome-session /etc/alternatives/x-session-manager
>
> Well, it worked for me anyway.
>
> cr
> ... very much a Debian newbie
> -
> To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-newbie" in
> the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
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Re: Switching between KDE and GNOME

[cr]

On Wednesday 02 July 2003 05:12, Dan Zlotnikov wrote:
> This is the most bizarre thing that's happened yet. I tried startkde from
> a text-term and it died. Trying to switch to the KDE wm from inside GNOME
> tended to hang up the x-session. Then, all of a sudden (must've been some
> bloody slow process in the background), KDE goes active on me. I'm not
> seeing any GNOME processes through ps -aux, it's all KDE now.
>
> Problem: Any attempt to access the drive is exceedingly slow. I'm talking
> about three minutes to load the /home filelist in Konqueror sort of slow.
> Something isn't working right, and I'll be damned if I knew what.
>
> Dan

Well, I'm back with Gnome now, but a number of things seem to be not 
working...   for example, right-click on the desktop doesn't bring up a menu. 
And a number of menu programs don't launch.   
So maybe KDE and Gnome interfere with some of each other's settings.   

There *used* to be, in RedHat 7.2 or thereabouts, a 'Desktop switcher' app.   
It required a restart of X for it to take effect.   But I can't seem to find 
it in Debian 3.0.

cr


> On Tue, 1 Jul 2003, cr wrote:
> > On Tuesday 01 July 2003 08:51, Dan Zlotnikov wrote:
> > > First of all, D'oh! 2.4.19, of course. Typoed.
> > >
> > > On Mon, 30 Jun 2003, Ray Olszewski wrote:
> > > > I don't run either KDE or Gnome here, so I can help only a little
> > > > with the DEbian parts.
> > > >
> > > > Assuming you are using the apt-* tools for package management, you
> > > > probably want to apt-get install kdebase . (At least this is right
> > > > for Sid; Woody is probably the same in this respect.) If its
> > > > installer is any good, it will either ask appropriate questions to
> > > > get you to replace Gnome with KDE, or it will do so without asking
> > > > (less likely but possible). Once the base stuff is installed, you'll
> > > > need to install appropriate specific
> > > > applications for kde.
> >
> > For what it's worth, I installed kdebase a week or so ago.    And bingo!,
> > without so much as asking me, KDE took over.    Next time I logged in my
> > screen looked like a jukebox.   (Sorry to any who *like* KDE's default
> > settings  :).
> >
> > (About two weeks ago I installed Debian 3.0, and somehow (blame Debian's
> > installer! :)  kdebase got missed out.   I had all the other KDE apps
> > like Kmail etc, though I 'always' run Gnome as a desktop.   But I noticed
> > that Kaddressbook was missing, so I installed kdebase (using kpackage as
> > the installer).
> >
> > I guess, if you're running Gnome, you may find Gnome-apt will do it,
> > though I've never tried it.   Anyway, there are a number of associated
> > KDE packages which you might want to install.   I would hope Gnome-apt
> > would prompt for or let you search for any such packages.
> >
> > The way to swap from one to the other, I found, is to make
> > /etc/alternatives/x-session-manager a symlink to either /usr/bin/kde2  or
> > /usr/bin/gnome-session.
> >
> > ln -s /usr/bin/gnome-session /etc/alternatives/x-session-manager
> >
> > Well, it worked for me anyway.
> >
> > cr
> > ... very much a Debian newbie
> > -
> > To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-newbie"
> > in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
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> > Please read the FAQ at http://www.linux-learn.org/faqs
>
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Re: Switching between KDE and GNOME

[Amin]

Hello,

On Wed, 2 Jul 2003 19:40:53 +1200, cr <cr@orcon.net.nz> wrote:

> There *used* to be, in RedHat 7.2 or thereabouts, a 'Desktop switcher' 
> app.   It required a restart of X for it to take effect.   But I can't 
> seem to find it in Debian 3.0.
>
> cr

I don't know how much this'll help, but I have three fully functional 
window managers/environments (a.k.a. IceWM, GNOME, KDE) that I run 
depending on my needs, and here's the file I use to switch between them:

$ more .Xclients-default
exec icewm || exec xterm -fn 7x14
#exec startkde || exec xterm -fn 7x14
#exec gnome-session || exec xterm -fn 7x14
$

As you can probably tell, IceWM is my favorite.

BTW, `.Xclients-default' is actually called from another file, at least on 
my system:

$ more .Xclients
#!/bin/bash

# Created by Red Hat Desktop Switcher

if [ -e "$HOME/.Xclients-$HOSTNAME$DISPLAY" ]; then
    exec $HOME/.Xclients-$HOSTNAME$DISPLAY
else
    exec $HOME/.Xclients-default
fi
$

I guess this is more flexible, but if you want, you could bypass the 
convolution and put your GNOME/KDE starting commands in `.Xclients'.  These 
files are shell scripts, of course, and they are a feature of the X Window 
System.

The reason I'm bringing this up is that, seeing as controlling desktop 
environments/WMs is more of an X issue, people ought to know that there's a 
standard way they can do it in all distros, regardless of whether the 
command-line/graphical tools are available (or not).  The standard 
(command-line and graphical) tool, is, of course, `switchdesk'.  No 
surprise:  `switchdesk' is itself (mostly) a shell script!

One last thing: I read in this thread that someone's been trying to use 
KDE's window manager with GNOME.  Please save yourself the headache!

HTH,
Yawar Amin
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Re: Switching between KDE and GNOME

[cr]

On Thursday 03 July 2003 01:54, Amin wrote:
> Hello,
>
> On Wed, 2 Jul 2003 19:40:53 +1200, cr <cr@orcon.net.nz> wrote:
> > There *used* to be, in RedHat 7.2 or thereabouts, a 'Desktop switcher'
> > app.   It required a restart of X for it to take effect.   But I can't
> > seem to find it in Debian 3.0.
> >
> > cr
>
> I don't know how much this'll help, but I have three fully functional
> window managers/environments (a.k.a. IceWM, GNOME, KDE) that I run
> depending on my needs, and here's the file I use to switch between them:
>
> $ more .Xclients-default
> exec icewm || exec xterm -fn 7x14
> #exec startkde || exec xterm -fn 7x14
> #exec gnome-session || exec xterm -fn 7x14
> $
>
> As you can probably tell, IceWM is my favorite.
>
> BTW, `.Xclients-default' is actually called from another file, at least on
> my system:
>
> $ more .Xclients
> #!/bin/bash
>
> # Created by Red Hat Desktop Switcher
>
> if [ -e "$HOME/.Xclients-$HOSTNAME$DISPLAY" ]; then
>     exec $HOME/.Xclients-$HOSTNAME$DISPLAY
> else
>     exec $HOME/.Xclients-default
> fi
> $
>
> I guess this is more flexible, but if you want, you could bypass the
> convolution and put your GNOME/KDE starting commands in `.Xclients'.  These
> files are shell scripts, of course, and they are a feature of the X Window
> System.
>
> The reason I'm bringing this up is that, seeing as controlling desktop
> environments/WMs is more of an X issue, people ought to know that there's a
> standard way they can do it in all distros, regardless of whether the
> command-line/graphical tools are available (or not).  The standard
> (command-line and graphical) tool, is, of course, `switchdesk'.  No
> surprise:  `switchdesk' is itself (mostly) a shell script!
>
> One last thing: I read in this thread that someone's been trying to use
> KDE's window manager with GNOME.  Please save yourself the headache!
>
> HTH,
> Yawar Amin

Thanks for that!

Incidentally, though I've always used a weird mixture of Gnome and KDE apps, 
I've never felt tempted to use the KDE windowmanager under Gnome.

cr

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Re: Switching between KDE and GNOME

[Dan Zlotnikov]

Well, I would never have tried, had I been able to start KDE in the first
place. Incidentally, after a restart of the x-server, I am unable to
return to KDE *boggle*

I've no idea what I did before, but startkde returns a bunch of errors.
switching to the KDE WM from GNOME tends to freeze the x-session and stop
responding to keyboard and mouse input.

Puzzled, I am.
%startkde
Error message from startkde below:
xsetroot: unable to open display ''
ksplash: cannot to connect to X server
Aborting. $DISPLAY is not set
ksmserver: cannot connect to X server
connect() failed: : No such file or directory
%

Dan


> > One last thing: I read in this thread that someone's been trying to use
> > KDE's window manager with GNOME.  Please save yourself the headache!
> >
> > HTH,
> > Yawar Amin
>
> Thanks for that!
>
> Incidentally, though I've always used a weird mixture of Gnome and KDE apps,
> I've never felt tempted to use the KDE windowmanager under Gnome.
>
> cr
>
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Re: Switching between KDE and GNOME

[Peter]

I am using fvwm2 or xfce. If I need access to gnome I type panel&, if I need 
access to kde I type kicker&. That way my desktop will not be clattered with 
icons. To put those panels out of the way I iconify them.

Regards


-- 
Peter

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