Is KDE on Fedora really that bad?

[Gene Heskett]

On Thursday 02 November 2006 00:09, Arthur Pemberton wrote:
>I just have to ask. I was reading through an article on slashdot.org,
>and I found a suprising number of comments which amounted to "KDE on
>RedHat is bad". As somone who has never tried anything but Fedora, but
>love KDE, I need to know...am I getting a raw deal without knowing it?
>
>Peace.
>
>--
>Fedora Core 5 and proud

This will be a one man story, Arther.

When I installed FC2 on this box, the first thing I tried to do was make 
the redhat supplied kde stuff "Just Work".  But it wouldn't, causing crash 
after crash when attempting to do anything related to printing.

Finally, in total frustration, I built kde-3.3.0 using their "konstruct" 
utility, and installed it all right in my root partition.

That did not fix my printing problems however, as that took another flash 
of insight so I built cups and gimp-print from tarballs.  Voila, 
everything except the spell checker works in kde.  And I haven't had ANY 
of the thousands of complaints about kde that have flowed by on this list.

In fact I've been reticent to install anything newer other than kernels, 
currently running 2.6.19-rc4 here just because getting a working system 
that claims to be all broken to hell when a package management program 
like yum or synaptic looks at it has taken a year to get to this level of 
truely usefull computing and I don't relish the thought of doing it again, 
although when I put FC5 on my lappy, the one program that progress has 
killed here, kino, now finally works on that machine.

Now I have a windows 98 casualty box that was given to me, an older compaq 
with a 500mhz k6 and 320 megs of ram it it thats totally flakey.  I've 
tried to get FC5 and FC6 to boot well enough to format the drive and blow 
the w98 install away but it self reboots, usually before loading vmlinuz.  
It has run memtest86 for 11 full passes, no problems there, but it takes 
this puppy an hour to fully boot windows 98.  I think I'm going to pull 
the drive, stick it in another box, and dd the DD-WRT image to it as I 
need to replace my existing and power hungry router and its gateway 
machine with something like the DD-WRT kit offers.

To get back on-topic, the redhat supplied kde parts often leave something 
to be desired.  However, I just installed 3.5.5, complete on the lappy, 
and its working quite well despite RH's obvious disdain for anything kde.  
My questions about its failures as they (RH) installed it on fc2 were 
always met with a "use gnome" attitude and no real answers, so I simply 
bypassed them and did my own, which has worked well for quite some time 
now.

As always, YMMV.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
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Copyright 2006 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.