Speeding up KDE and its apps.

[Fintan]

I just picked this up from Davo over at he mepis form:

On a new install, KDE Fonts will not be defined,
just some generic aliases i.e Sans (Serif) , Serif and Monospace.
Defining fonts, both globally and per application, can make the desktop become more responsive.

Find the best fonts available for your system, per font family, with this command
$ fc-match sans serif ; fc-match serif ; fc-match monospace

This may return Bitstream-Vera fonts with Mepis 7 beta, DejaVu fonts with Mepis 6.x series
or different fonts if using webcore fonts (i.e. Verdana, Tahoma etc ).
fc-match -s serif would show all possible matches for the serif family, sorted for best match.

Then open Alt+F2 > kcontrol > Appearance & Themes > Fonts
change all of the aliases there ( Sans(Serif), Serif and Monospace) to actual fonts and Apply changes.

You can also specify font(s) in other apps i.e. Firefox (Edit > Preferences > Content > Fonts and Colors),
Konqueror ( Settings > Configure Konqueror > Fonts)

Then run this command, in konsole, to cache font information for faster loading:
( This runs fc-cache as user, asks for the root password, runs again as root and returns to a user prompt)
$ fc-cache -f -v ; su -c "fc-cache -f -v"

Quick tests (before and after examples) ... to check if it does help:
Alt+F2 > xterm and enter these commands

$ time konsole -e bash -c exit
Before:real 0m6.345s user 0m0.967s sys 0m0.079s
After: real 0m0.864s user 0m0.687s sys 0m0.053s

$ time kfmclient openProfile filemanagement&
Before:real 0m7.225s user 0m0.289s sys 0m0.020s
After: real 0m2.773s user 0m0.260s sys 0m0.017s

First cmd: times launching a (new) konsole window, running 'exit' and closing.
Second cmd: times opening Home folder in konqueror (Ctrl + C to recover bash prompt afterwards)
("real" value is overall time taken launching - and includes loading libraries,colors & fonts; drawing windows etc.)
Thanks

This may be useful to a few

Cheers