Posts tagged KDE

Wow, feels like I haven’t blogged in a long time.  Time is flying by with the new year heading into February already.  I decided I would take a look at 5.1 x86 KDE edition since it’s been a long time since I have messed with x86 and KDE.  I slotted myself some time, which was my first mistake as I was rushed to it and it came back to bite me.  Silly mistakes when rushed can turn something into a much longer ordeal.  I’ll give you the details.

Booted up the iso and everything was working out of the box and so I kicked the installer in and updated it and went ahead with my install.  I did a manual partition with reiserfs and of course told it to skip the bootloader as I already have grub setup.  After install I went in and edited my grub.conf file and here is where it got me.  Being lazy I took the line above it from my MCE x86_64 line and copied and pasted it.  I did change the kernel so it was . 31 from .32, but that was it.  You see what is going to happen?  My paths are all pointing to a correct kernel of the x86_64 path.  I tell it to reboot and this is where my troubles start.

As it reboots I am not paying attention and soon get the KDM login screen and I log in, but my resolution is all wrong.  I copy over my existing xorg.conf that works fine and checked with my eselect opengl list and had to changed it to nvidia.  I restart xdm and there I sit at a black screen with a blinking cursor.  I check the Xorg log and it says nvidia not loaded.  I thought ok, let’s reboot and upon reboot I get greeted with the same blank screen and this time I noticed on boot about a bunch of stuff having issues.  So than I start to think maybe nvidia driver is not installed properly and fire up equo update and it spits out at me it can’t connect.  Odd, networking worked fine on the live version.  I run net-setup and it can’t find a single network device.  Now I am thinking, is my kernel compiled without the drivers, no that wouldn’t make sense.  I’m digging through the gentoo networking documentation now and nothing is making sense.  After an hour of scratching my head I noticed on one of the reboots that my host was saying x86_64.  So I head back into grub.conf file and start looking at the line.  Sure enough my root (x,x) was point to my 64 bit install, argh!  Edited that and rebooted into my desktop.  This is what happens when a person gets lazy and doesn’t pay attention.

Next goal was to get the latest entropy system.  This is critical for anyone that is installing a 5.1 system.  The method that works best for this is to equo update to get the repositories updated than do equo install entropy equo sulfur –relaxed as that will pull in the needed files without the 100+ other updates. I should mention that I did add the limbo repo also.  Now I got the latest entropy system and since Fabio has been riding me about how fantastic the new Sulfur is I thought fine, I would do the upgrade/world with Sulfur and see what happens.  I’ve never been a fan of Sulfur as I prefer the terminal, but I do have to admit, Sulfur is looking pretty good.  The updates tab was showing my something like 300+ updates, but was kinda confused as how to select em all as I didn’t want to go down each line and select upgrade.  I hit Ctrl + a and it selected em all and than left clicked on a package and than right click and marked upgrade.  It kinda paused for a moment after that, but it did select all for upgrade after that.  I went over to actions and committed it and waited for it to download and install all packages.  I did have to ok some licenses, but Sulfur completed the task with no problems.  I don’t recall seeing a equo conf update tho, so I ran that and had a couple minor files to update.  Time to reboot and see how all went.  Well upon reboot I get the kdm login, but the desktop won’t load at all.  I could alt +  F2 and run applications tho, so it was just the KDE desktop not loading.  I couldn’t find any thing that was pointing to an obvious solution.  For the heck of it I decided to do an equo install kde-meta and noticed it wanted to pull 229 packages.  I thought that was odd as I had just did the updates and there was no more to get.  So I did the kde-meta install and rebooted and was greeted with the full blown KDE upon logging in.  I kept  getting WICD popping up and wanting a password, which I didn’t have before, so I removed WICD as I wanted NM for testing.  I see on the forum others are posting about this too.  I thought everything was going good till I tried amarok and had no sound than it dawned on me that KDE usually has a start up tune and I hadn’t heard that.  I fired up a browser and had sound in flash along with VLC, and XBMC.  I went into System-Settings – sound and bumped my soundcard to the top of the list on everything but still nothing.  There was no pulseaudio in there tho.  Issuing the command as user pulseaudio -k brought back all the sounds.  I still don’t know what is up with that, but it will be looked into.

I believe now everything is running good.  I encourage everyone to check out the latest Sulfur and the git one actually has more new features that will be coming in.  Incase you missed it, entropy now has bash complete which is really sweet.  To get this up in konsole we have to make some changes to your konsole profile.

1.  Open Konsole and click on Settings to Edit Current Profile

2.  On the General tab you will see Command:  /bin/bash change that line to /bin/bash –login

3.  Let make sure it’s enabled with eselect bashcomp enable equo

4.  Now you need to kill all Bash and Konsole and restart it.  In Konsole all I did was killall -9 bash and than closed the Konsole window.  Now restart Konsole and to use it properly you need to  su - and than it will work.  Try out equo search ama <tab> <tab> and you can do same as user also, but will need to be root to install of course.  You can also enable and disable repos too, example:  equo repo enable sabayon-limbo or equo repo disable sabayon-limbo.

Next time you see Fabio, give him a big thanks for these awesome improvements.  Thanks again Fabio!