[2024-feb-29] Sad news: Eric Layton aka Nocturnal Slacker aka vtel57 passed away on Feb 26th, shortly after hospitalization. He was one of our Wiki's most prominent admins. He will be missed.

Welcome to the Slackware Documentation Project

KDE

KDE Software Compilation (KDE SC) is a desktop environment that provides the user a full graphical experience and includes a large number of applications, ranging from browser to photo-editing software. It is based on the Qt toolkit.

Introduction

Installation

New Installation

KDE is included in the installation DVD and is the default environment if you perform a full installation.

During the installation process, please make sure that you select the KDE (and KDEI for international language support if needed) package series.

Adding KDE to an existing install

If KDE was not selected during the installation process, it can be installed later using the slackpkg program as follows:

darkstar~# slackpkg install kde

All packages under the kde branch will be selected for installation. You can deselect individual packages that you want to skip during installation, before you press ENTER to start the actual installation.

Custom packages

If you wish to use a more recent version of KDE than either the stable or current branch, you can use some more up-to-date packages. AlienBob's ktown provides the latest software collection and the needed steps to perform the installation. Keep in mind that those packages are not officially supported by Slackware.

Configuration

Visual Unification

Non KDE applications will revert to generic GTK look and feel and will not have the same visual styling as KDE packages.
As a work-around there are a few packages that are available to help make a unification of look and feel between KDE and non-KDE applications.

kde44-oxygen-molecule

Can be downloaded from SBo. After installing, go to System Settings → Application Appearance → Colors and select Oxygen-Molecule_3.
To make non-KDE applications read this setting, create a new file called .gtkrc-2.0 in your home directory and populate it with:

include "/usr/local/share/themes/kde44-oxygen-molecule/gtk-2.0/gtkrc"
style "user-font"
{
}
widget_class "*" style "user-font"
gtk-theme-name="kde44-oxygen-molecule"
gtk-font-name="fontname fontsize"   //  (for example: "Sans 10")

Sometimes the same file needs to be named “.gtkrc-2.0-kde4” so it is a good practice to have both files:

darkstar~# ln -s .gtkrc-2.0 .gtkrc-2.0-kde4

Keyboard setup

Should you wish to configure your keyboard setup, please look at the kde keyboard layout page.

Troubleshooting

  • What about switching to KDE4 ? (in French)
    Introducing KDE4 for newbies and explaining all the quirks you need to grasp to be able to use it for production. The article is based on a stock Slackware 13.37 system, so everything actually just works as is. This is a six-page article by Kiki Novak, written in french and published in the french print magazine Planète Linux (66th issue, September-October 2011). Important note of the author: I own the rights for this article, so I decided to link to it here. Feel free to cannibalize it as you wish: take bits from it, include it partly or as a whole in the wiki, translate it, etc. To make the task easier for you, here's a link to a compressed archive in ZIP format containing all the individual files used in the production of the article, like the original text in ODT format, and a dozen screenshots in PNG format. Enjoy ;o)
 slackware:kde ()