[YLUG] Fedora usability [was Re: clone fedora 10]

[mike cloaked]

On Tue, Jan 6, 2009 at 7:39 PM, Gaffer. <derrick_s at tesco.net> wrote:

> FWIW I just installed Fedora 10 on my Dell Inspiron 1300 Laptop.
> Celeron D cpu 512Mb ram and 30Gb HDD.  Without any problems or issues
> at all.
>
> The only complaint that I have is that I prefer the KDE desktop rather
> than the default Gnome one !  I still have to figure out how to get and
> install it though.

You could try
yum groupinstall kde-desktop

Remember you will get KDE4 which is very different to KDE3.5!

To switch over the best I find is that you create a file
/etc/sysconfig/desktop containing:
DESKTOP="KDE"
DISPLAYMANAGER="KDE"
which will then use the kdm login greeter rather than gdm.  You can
easily revert to gdm if you want to but I find kdm is better anyway
and looks nicer.
Then reboot - when the kdm login greeter first loads it won't have a
desktop selected to login to so choose KDE from the "Session Type"
menu option and then click on the required user name. That user will
then appear in the username at the top and you can enter the password
and login.

Next time round you will have the previous user already in the top
white box.  kdm is configurable from the kicker menu once you are
logged in to KDE.

You can also login to KDE once the kde desktop files are installed by
choosing the username in the gdm greeter and then selecting the kde
desktop just before pressing the button to login - so using gdm the
switch is somewhat hidden and it is more obvious in the kdm greeter.

The other nice thing about kdm is that it will time out and make the
monitor go into powersave if no user logs in whereas gdm does not!  In
addition you can easily customise the user avatars for kdm from the
configuration options once logged into KDE (you need the root password
to do it of course)

Hope this helps.
-- 
mike