Setting up a minimal KDE

[Manish Jain]

On Tue, Apr 11, 2017 at 11:20 PM, Ernie Luzar <luzar722 at gmail.com> wrote:
Manish Jain wrote:
Hi, On my tertiary box, I was facing multiple problems with FreeBSD 11 Release. Rather than fix each one, I decided to try a new, daring approach - a minimal KDE atop FreeBSD 12.0-CURRENT r316508. Comments, suggestions, tips and experimentation requests are open to this venture. I installed FreeBSD CURRENT and then installed kde via 'pkg install kde'. After kde installation was over, I realized that I was running against my original aspiration of a minimal KDE. So I did the following to remove KDE : pkg delete -R kde pkg autoremove Then I installed lightweight KDE using : pkg install kde-baseapps kde-workspace kde-runtime The above setup has the following components built-in : konsole, kate, kdm. It was missing okular, k3b and kolourpaint, but these easily be installed via pkg. I now have a fully functional KDE and a box that, despite being CURRENT, works well. There are glitches, however. If anyone has tips to help resolve the glitches, it shall lead to the perfect KDE setup : 1) This is the more serious glitch. Taskbar icons in the KDE panel, for some reason I cannot guess why, are rendered horribly. Fonts everywhere else are pretty much the same as before, but iconified taskbar fonts in the panel are very, very ugly. 2) Because my network interface is statically configured, I want to turn off dhclient entirely, so that it does not work on each reboot automatically. DHCPDISCOVER packets cost me about a minute on system start-up. I have tried putting the following in /etc/rc.conf, but this does not seem to have any effect : 'dhcpd_enabled=NO"'. 3) I can't figure out how to remove nepomuk-core. 'pkg delete nepomuk-core' says it would also lead to removal of kde-baseapps, which would obviously be a very bad idea. Thanks for any help. If anyone has experimentation requests with FreeBSD CURRENT and/or KDE, please feel free to ping me.
Can't help you with items 1 & 3, but item 2 is an easy one to fix. In your rc.conf file you must have a statement something this; ifconfig_rl0="DHCP" where rl0 is the interface facing the public internet. Remove it or comment it out


Hi Ernie,

I figured out the underlying problem, which must rank as one of the cleverer things I have done in my life (of which there are not very many, quite happily). The Desktop Theme I was previously using after the full KDE install had been customized to use the Slim Glow theme. When I did 'pkg delete kde' and 'pkg autoremove', it produced the pristine KDE-less environment with just xorg.

Before setting up the minimal KDE, I had to change the Desktop Theme back to the original Oxygen theme which works with the base KDE packages. Leaving the Slim Glow setting was messing up the hidden KDE confirguration. Luckily, the system settings applet is available to set things things right again.


As for the DHCP problem that remains outstanding, this is what my rc.conf has :

ifconfig_re0="inet 192.168.1.94 netmask 255.255.255.0"
defaultrouter="192.168.1.1"

That rc clearly states that I need a static configuration. But dhclient still runs at system startup, losing me over a minute each time.

Regards
Manish Jain