Jul 3, 2016

Hello Plasma KDE 5.5.5

Have been long time jailed into Gnome world. Decided to grab Kde-Plasma on the nice lappie Lenovo T430, not really powerful but 1600 x 900 screen on 14" display look good. Need to learn and read pages on internet to understand the Plasma. Be sure, it is worth spending Ramadhlan holiday by build great desktop system on Gentoo. I have tried, ubuntu gnome 14.04, Eelementary OS 0.2, ArchLinux and finally falling back to Gentoo I faced struggle on dealing with system D considering the system will powering a piece of laptop, switched back to stable OpenRC save a lot of time and energy.
Hazzle
  1. Mysterious local hostname
  2. dhcppc2 mysterious hostname suspected coming from bugs of NetworkManager, turn to WICD, the hazzle gone. But I faced another problem, connection to home wifi router regularly disconnected, every 15 - 20 minuted. I have to recompile several time and reconfigured WICD, no lucks, problem persist. Unmerged WICD back to relly on wpa_supplicant and finally decided to build wpa_supplicant with GUI enabled, thus USE flags, qt5 must be disabled and enable qt4 WPA Gui running smoothly and almost no single problem. I don't think I will connect to wired network with this lappie, thus WPA GUI is suffice. Alternatively I used DHCPCD-UI built with qt4, but this piece of GUI must run as root to work properly in my system. Then I stick with WPA_gui.

  3. SDDM, LightDM but No KDM
  4. By default on Gentoo e-builds, kde-plasma/plasma-meta grab sddm as display manager, with USE flags : consolekit enabled as well as XDM. From some reading, the best way to start a Desktop Environment is the DE itself. In several occasions, Plasma DE did not start after log in, screen just blank and nothing can do, thus I need to log in to terminal either rebooting the machine or start DE manually. It is not the way GUI should working.
    by disabled USE Flag : -sddm portage will grab lightDM, nothing wrong with lightDM, but I believed to developer team, by choosing SDDM, they must have good reason. Thus I will stick with SDDM. The solution is to disable consolekit USE flag in merging SDDM and XDM and back to old fashion using startkde ini .xinitrc file .... LOL
    I did not read release Note, but do not know the reason they dropped KDM on kde-plasma, KDM is heavy but cool.
Overall KDE Plasma is great DE ... I think better than Gnome 3 ....

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