The quest for a pure KDE computer

[claydoh]

I haven't followed this thread too well, but I have installed the most very basic KDE desktop by using the meta-package kde-baseapps, on top of a bare Ubuntu install, on my Freescale Arm board. This bare cli setup is 10.04 with some backend stuff specifically for this device, but kde-baseapps did get me a KDE plasma desktop which included dolphin, Konqueror, System Settings, Kate or Kwrite (cannot remember) and not much else. This may be a good place to start in your VM, but as you can see a lot of utilities, tools, and programs are not included in a base KDE, so you will get to choose and add stuff you like or need.

I ended up ditching KDE on that Arm board because Kwin would die due to the video driver it used and Kwin's pickiness in the version Lucid has. Upgrading was out of the question as the non-free driver is not available for newer kernels, meaning video playback is impossible.

[SteveRiley]

Well, this experiment is over. Over the last week, Ive reinstalled about a dozen times but every time ends the same way: the desktop freezes on boot due to a missing library.

Hm... sorry that it wasn't working for you. Building one's own distro can be challenging.

Should you ever get the urge to try again, perhaps moving up one level might work better. The package kde-standard pulls in many more elements, including applications and libraries. Perhaps that would include whatever's missing from your earlier experiment.

[whatthefunk]

Hm... sorry that it wasn't working for you. Building one's own distro can be challenging.

Should you ever get the urge to try again, perhaps moving up one level might work better. The package kde-standard pulls in many more elements, including applications and libraries. Perhaps that would include whatever's missing from your earlier experiment.

As soon as I get everything sorted on this install, Im going to play around with this in a VM. The biggest problem, as I mentioned, was that the system was trying to autoremove itself. Dolphin, kate, and other important applications kept coming up on the autoremove list along with huge numbers of libraries. Maybe kde-standard would help correct this. Anyway, thanks for all the tips Steve!

[SteveRiley]

Dolphin, kate, and other important applications kept coming up on the autoremove list

This is a potential hint. I'm not sure how deep your understanding of DPKG/APT is, so forgive the possible pedantic nature of what I'm about to write.

Imagine that you install package alice. Alice depends on bob, which in turn depends on charlie. The package catalog keeps track of which packages are installed manually (alice, in this case) and which are installed "automatically" -- that is, to satisfy a dependency (bob and charlie, in this case).

How can you tell? Well, one way is to look at /var/log/apt/history.log; this is tedious. dpkg won't tell you. But Aptitude will: this is one of the many reasons why I continue to appreciate this tool more and more.

Now suppose you don't want alice around anymore, so you purge her it. bob and charlie, installed to meet dependency requirements, have no reason to stick around. Thus, apt-get autoremove will do exactly what it's told: delete all dependents whose "ancestors" are no longer on the system.

Here's were Aptitude can really be helpful in diagnosing what's going on. When you fire it up and start to expand the package list categories, you'll see some status indicators. i means "installed." i A means "installed automatically." Furthermore, Aptitude can tell you why something was installed automatically by displaying the dependency chain that brought it in (or will bring it in, if the package of interest isn't currently installed).

Even better, Aptitude allows you to change the "automatic" flag. So for all those packages that wanted to autoremove themselves, you could simply highlight them and press "m" to mark them as "manual." I know this isn't an actual solution to what your problem was, but it is a handy workaround. Honestly, I'm at a loss to understand why your APT wanted to get rid of Dolphin in the first place. The only relevant package that depends on Dolphin is kde-baseapps, which in turn is a dependent of kde-plasma-desktop. So something must have been trying to remove one or other of those two ancestors, which rather mystifies me.

[SecretCode]

As the young kids say today, +1 for aptitude!