Kde4 minimal

KDE stands for K Desktop Environment. It is one of the larger sets of packages you can emerge on Gentoo. Many users who want integrated KDE applications may not want to emerge the KDE4 Meta packages since upgrades and maintainability will be more difficult with the unslotted install. Many Users hesitant to migrate to KDE4 may want to try this approach.

Packages
KDE is available in the kde-base category and the kde-misc package categories.

Minimal Install
In this guide we will install a minimum of KDE packages for basic use. Before starting it is best to update the system and world. Do not uninstall KDE 3.5 as you can test some applications like konqueror in kde 3.5 before making the full switch over.

Installation
Before emerging KDE, set minimal languages in make.conf

Minimal Install KDE
First disable ccache for this one emerge as kde-base/kstartupconfig and kde-base/kdebase-startkde did not compile with ccache for me.

This will give you a minimal desktop-environment and you can go on by emerging single applications from the kde-* package categories. Here is a very minimal set up for web browsing, email terminal, text editor.

It appears that the file manager code has been removed from konqueror. If you want a graphical file manager emerge

Other packages to consider: kde-base/okular universal document viewer based on KPDF for KDE 4.

Auto-mounting
In order to use the auto-mounting features in kde, you need hal:

Starting with startx
Configure your local session using ~/.xinitrc

Now start up your graphical environment by running startx:

Using the display manager
The KDM display manager gives you the choice of logging into KDE3 or KDE4. During the update from KDE3 to KDE4 I was forced to unmerge KDM due to blockers.

Setting KDM to run automatically

Migrating settings from KDE3 to KDE4
To ensure you still have your Bookmarks, Kwallet and Kmail in KDE4 copy your settings to kde's new settings directory before you first log into KDE4. Make a new kde4 settings directory and move files over