The good, the bad, and the ugly, 11.04

[Detonate]

As many of you know, I switched to Ubuntu after Hardy, because I did not like KDE4. Now I am switching back to Kubuntu.

I upgraded my Ubuntu Maverick to Natty and it screwed up a few things. The Unity desktop, installed by default interferes with my Gnome settings. Several things just don't work right anymore.

So I installed Kubuntu Natty on a separate partition.

It will now be my main OS and desktop. I have spent several days playing around with all of the settings, and I have it working pretty much to my satisfaction.

I am learning to really like Kwin. The only issue I have is, I wish I had a better understanding of what all of the different settings in "Desktop Effects' do. I'll learn by trial and error. I'm used to compiz but I will learn Kwin.

I've only broken my desktop four times so far.

I'm enjoying the learning experience.

Biggest complaint I have is that settings are not all found under "System Settings" but are spread all over and not enough explanation of what some of them do.

I still have not found how to change the background color of my panels, but I did manage to change the font so I can at least read text in the panels.

[kubicle]

Re: The good, the bad, and the ugly, 11.04

I still have not found how to change the background color of my panels, but I did manage to change the font so I can at least read text in the panels.

The panels are handled by the plasma workspace theme (in SystemSettings>WorkspaceAppearance), and only some of them (like aya) use your color theme in the panels...others use hard-coded graphics (which you can of course change if you know your way around svg graphics). I'd suggest trying out a few different themes first, to see if one of them meets your requirements.

[Detonate]

Re: The good, the bad, and the ugly, 11.04

I'll try some different themes. Thanks

[wizard10000]

Re: The good, the bad, and the ugly, 11.04

Detonate, if you were using emerald before rog132 (formerly rog131 here) created a kwin style that can use an emerald theme. Since emerald is broken in Natty his kwin-style-smaragd has allowed me to use my favorite emerald theme in KDE.

I sent him a PM to thank him for smaragd but it went to his old vaporized account, so I'll thank him publicly here

Thanks, rog - I haven't found a theme I like better than the euh emerald theme. Now I can use it in KDE again.

[Detonate]

Re: The good, the bad, and the ugly, 11.04

Where do I get it?

[wizard10000]

Re: The good, the bad, and the ugly, 11.04

Where do I get it?

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:samrog131/ppa

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install kwin-style-smaragd

You extract your emerald theme to ~/.emerald/theme and in systemsettings --> Workspace Appearance --> Window Decorations you select 'Smaragd' as your theme.

Here's where I get emerald themes -

http://compiz-themes.org/index.php?xcontentmode=103

or on kde-look.org

and I use this one -

http://compiz-themes.org/content/sho...?content=48273

but you can get it here as well -

http://kde-look.org/content/show.php?content=48273

More info on smaragd from kde-look -

http://kde-look.org/content/show.php...content=125162

The page says you have to compile from source, but as above there's a ppa available.

[dibl]

Re: The good, the bad, and the ugly, 11.04

@Detonate, if you haven't figured it out already, there are a series of gtk-related packages that will smooth out the kwin presentation of windows and window decorations for gtk packages. In my little cheater list of "install these first" packages, I have these:

gtk2-engines gtk2-engines-oxygen gtk2-engines-qtcurve gtk-qt-engine

kde-config-gtk-style

qtcurve

system-config-gtk-kde

Some of them may not be applicable for Kubuntu, vs. my KDE on Debian, but I recommend installing all of them that you can find.

[wizard10000]

Re: The good, the bad, and the ugly, 11.04

I use QtCurve widgets simply because of their ease of integration. To configure the thing in KDE I use gtk-chtheme because I've had better luck with it than native KDE tools.

One thing - applications that run as root needs to be configured as root (like synaptic).

[Detonate]

Re: The good, the bad, and the ugly, 11.04

Don't have time to play with it right now, I'll work on it some more tomorrow. Thanks for all the suggestions.

[Detonate]

Re: The good, the bad, and the ugly, 11.04

BTW, I fixed the problems with my Gnome desktop in Ubuntu 11.04. It was a simple as issueing the command
sudo apt-get purge Unity