KDE

I had the idea of getting my old 19″-screen back onto my table – in addition to my 22″-widescreen, of course!

However, this meant to recompile 350 packages with xinerama-support – sometimes, Windows indeed IS easier than Gentoo….

In order to set up both screens on Linux, I followed the HOWTO Dual Monitors in the Gentoo-Wiki, mostly. As I have an Nvidia with Twinview, I went for this option.

Issueing lspci gave this result for the graphic card:

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation G71 [GeForce 7950 GT] (rev a1)

So, here’s the section for the card in /etc/X11/xorg.conf (note that this readme file was also helpful on some options):

Section "Device"
Identifier "Card0"
Driver "nvidia"
VendorName "nVidia Corporation"
BoardName "7950GT"
BusID "PCI:1:0:0"
Option "NoLogo" "1"
Option "RenderAccel" "true"
Option "AllowGLXWithComposite" "true"
Option "backingstore" "true"
Option "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "true"
Option "UseEdidDpi" "false"
Option "DPI" "96 x 96"
# added this for TwinView
Option "TwinView"
Option "MetaModes" "1680x1050,1280x1024; 1680x1050"
Option "TwinViewOrientation" "RightOf"
Option "SecondMonitorHorizSync" "UseEdidFreqs"
Option "SecondMonitorVertRefresh" "UseEdidFreqs"
EndSection

After restarting X, I had dual screens – and it seems, thanks to KDE, that I don’t even need to load xinerama… Maybe Linux is still just as easy as Windows?

KDE 3.5.7 is finally stable on Gentoo. Today, I started the upgrade cycle. According to various sources, the critical part is the new expat – first thing to do should be to upgrade expat and then to revdep-rebuild.

After this is now done, I will shut down kde, move my kde-folders in the home directory to some backup folders and upgrade KDE. See you in a while…

EDIT: I emerged 259 packages (including expat and some other, non-KDE stuff). I first hat to unmerge kdesktop, ksync and kmail.

But all is working fine now. See the techie-section for a current screenshot (August 2007).

I was like changing my system’s appearance today – so I decided to once again install baghira. I was pointed to this excellent guide (and later also this one) – I did not follow it entirely, but enough to now have a nice OSX-like style on my KDE…. I will add screenshots later.

EDIT: Here they are: Busy and Clean

Now, I am into giving my system the last tweaks and bits to look absolutely gorgeous.
Somehow I was not at all satisfied with my fonts setting. By accident I saw a screenshot of some very nice fonts in the forums; I therefore altered my /etc/fonts/local.conf as given in the corresponding entry. Wow! (Note that I left the fonts to the Bitstream Vera ones – the others suggested in the post did not look good on my screen, for whatever reason…)
Also, following the wiki entry on Gentoo Xeffects, I made my beryl to autostart and to take over from KWin. However, I did not have a file called /etc/env.d/99kde-env; looking at the Beryl entry on the Gentoo-Wiki made clear that I had to alter the file /etc/env.d/45kdepaths-3.5.
Note: KDE just crashed again – similar to described in an earlier entry; I don’t really understand what’s going on, but I will definitively keep an eye on this!

Today, my new KDE crashed again on my new system, I decided to do something about it. According to this post, I have several possibilities; I went for the last one. So, I changed the CFLAGS in /etc/make.conf to have -O2 instead of -Os (probably I should recompile my whole system now…) and recompiled xorg-server, xorg-x11 and everything in x11-base and x11-libs. Took a while…….
Now, let’s hope everything goes well!

I also installed GIMP today, and Firstclass. For the later, there is no official ebuild, but I found something on bugs.gentoo.org. I adjusted the ebuild to install the latest version of the Firstclass client and also attached my new ebuild to bugs.gentoo.org
That’s it for today!