So after some frustrations with GNOME and various applications flat out breaking, I decided I might as well give KDE4 another chance to redeem itself. Installation was fairly easy, but I was plagued by a problem from the start. I had a dock like application of unknown origin that was starting with my new KDE session. After a lot of hunting down I discovered it wasn’t a dock at all, but actually gnome-do. I had completely forgotten that gnome-do could look like a fancy dock. After sorting that out I decided to keep the dock at the top of the screen at the smallest size which autohides itself when needed.

Next up was getting all those keybinds and shortcuts sorted out. My suspend and lock laptop keys weren’t working nor was my volume keys. This was somewhat disappointing that it wasn’t automagically working, but I managed to mostly solve my issues. Input Actions under system preferences let me do the bulk of my configuration. Volume Up and Volume Down keys were recognized by KDE, so I simply bound them to the commands

and

. I was surprised to find out that my suspend key was also recognized by KDE, but I needed a way to actually make it suspend. After poking around with qdbus I discovered it was relatively simple. All what was needed was binding the key to this command:

. Relatively easy after poking around the qdbusviewer which let me visually stumble around dbus commands.

I then proceeded to try to bind my lock screen key, but KDE complained that the key was “unsupported” or something similar. Well, it was time to finally figure out all that acpid magic. After reading the man page and a bit of googling, I banged out a relatively simple script to lock the screen for me.

/etc/acpi/events/lock:

/etc/acpi/actions/lock.sh:

Probably not the best way of doing it, but it works for now so I’m relatively happy.

Didn’t need to do much for adjusting urxvt for KDE4, just added transparency to my existing config so it would fit in. Currently using claws-mail but might try out kmail later this week. I only needed to emerge x11-themes/gtk-engines-qt to make GTK not look so hideous that the default it without styling. Would be nice if I could get some kind of on screen display for when I change the brightness with my laptop keys, I’ll have to look into that a bit later.

Thats all I can remember for now, will need to explore KDE4 a bit more to see if it can replace GNOME full time.