Fedora 9 and KDE 4
I’ve recently upgraded my home PC from Fedora 8 to Fedora 9. One of the big benefits (apart from getting the very latest Firefox and Thunderbird packages) is that F9 features KDE 4, the latest version of the KDE desktop window manager.
Fedora 9
To upgrade, I followed the excellent instructions at http://www.gagme.com/greg/linux/f9-tips.php. The key point is to use the ‘preupgrade’ package to sort everything out:
yum -y install preupgrade
preupgrade
This downloads new F9 versions of all the RPM packages you have on your system and then sets everything up so that when you re-boot your machine it will start F9.
It’s an excellent idea, and for me It Just Worked.
KDE 4
KDE version 4 is all rather new. Initially I had version 4.0 installed. The biggest drawback to this version was the absence of the Fuzzy Clock. However, I’m pleased to say that on my first ‘yum update’, my system was upgraded to KDE 4.1, complete with Fuzzy Clock. Whilst version 4.0 was looking a bit rough round the edges, 4.1 is a far more polished affair.
One of the new features (on System Settings, Desktop, General tab) is the ability to ‘Enable desktop effects’, which makes the whole machine much more Mac-like in the prettyness of the desktop. However, I noticed that with this turned on, even when nothing else was running, I was using about 50% of my CPU power just to run the desktop. So I turned that off 
The other annoyance in KDE4 was the lack of launch buttons on the panel for my favourite applications. This was really getting on my nerves until I realised that the default ‘tab’ shown initially when clicking on the ‘K’ menu button is the Favourites tab. To add things to the Favourites tab just find the application in the labyrinth of menus on the ‘K’ menu, click it with the secondary mouse button and select ‘Add to Favourites’ from the context-sensitive menu. Now all your favourite applications are just 2 clicks away on the ‘K’ menu button.
UPDATE: Neither KDE 4.0 nor KDE 4.1 can cope with dual screen display systems! I’ve seen comments that imply dual screen configurations are very rare and so fixing the problems is not a priority. Boo : -( See my comments below for details.
UPDATE: I installed Fedora 9 and KDE 4 on my new work machine. Unfortunately, support for dual-screen configurations is broken in KDE 4.1. So, I’m having to struggle personfully on with GNOME instead for the moment. With a bit of work I was able to get GNOME to look like KDE. My main gripes so far are no fuzzy clock and the terminal application limits the amount of scrollback buffer. OK, the limit is about 100,000 lines or something equally off the scale, but with Konsole you can select unlimited scrollback, and it will page the scrollback buffer out to disk when necessary. Normally the amount of scrollback is not too important, but when you need it, you really do need it
↓ Quote | Posted2008-10-03, 01:33UPDATE: I’ve pretty much given Gnome up in favour of XFCE4.4. It’s a light-weight, fast window manager, and it copes with dual screens just fine. And it maximises windows the same way that KDE does, which is extremely gratifying.
The maximise button will maximise a window to full screen size if you click your primary mouse button on it. If you use the secondary button it will make the window as wide as it can, but keep the same height. If you use the middle mouse button, the window will be as tall as it can, but keep the original width (useful for terminal sessions).
So, it looks like I’ll be with XFCE until KDE gets sorted out.
↓ Quote | Posted2008-11-09, 03:30