REFRESH: Peng’s May 2012 desktop screenshots … Now with Bespin!

I know I just posted a set of screenshots about ten days ago but shortly after I posted that I ended up finding Bespin, an extra fancy style for the KDE desktop. Back before I even started looking at leaving GNOME I had seen screenshots with Bespin over at the Ubuntu Forums and loved how they looked, and once I started rebuilding this desktop I knew I wanted to get that application appearance style back, if only I could remember what the hell it was called. It ended up taking a while to get to the point where I could remember what it was called and while there aren’t packages built yet you can build it from source by using either SVN or by downloading the tarball. I ended up doing the latter, partly because my ‘net connection here at Starbucks gets pretty damned slow at times, and I’m not going to make this a tutorial on installing Bespin, but if y’all want me to just let me know in the comments.

Other than the switch to using Bespin rather than Oxygen for my application style my desktop’s pretty much the same, other than the introduction of the Now Playing plasmoid because the Current Song plasmoid went stupid on me and I kept having to remove it and put it back on my desktop too damned often. I’m not thrilled with where it is and how big it is but I’ll deal with that later on.

As before my laptop is a lenovo T61 running Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) with Update Pack 4, and with KDE 4.7.4 installed on top of that. I could have gone with Linux Mint 12 KDE  when I rebuilt Katia but I got so used to LMDE’s true-Debian base instead of the Kubuntu base of Mint 12 KDE I honestly didn’t want to go back to the Ubuntu base. That and I’m really trying to not use things Mark Shuttleworth does as much as humanly possible. It does limit how many apps I can get installable packages for but I’m willing to take that hit. But that’s just me and your mileage may vary.

Clean

For those who want to know, that’s the incredible Vin Scully, the voice of your Los Angeles Dodgers (now with a league leading 30-14 record!). I think I got the image from someone on Twitter but I can’t recall the particulars right now. As usual I resized it to best fit my 1440×900 desktop and threw the Dodger Stadium 50th Anniversary logo on it as a “bug.” (The good kind of bug, not the kind you want to squash.)

Dirty with web browser
 

This time my browser shows off my absolute favorite business/finance show on public radio, Marketplace from American Public Media (you really should check them out if you want a biz/finance show that lets non-biz/finance folk understand what the hell is going on in that world), but the big change is in Dolphin, my file manager app. You’ll notice the panel and layout looks different from my old screenshots, and that’s the beauty of Bespin. It’s all controllable, although I haven’t seen a way to move the vertical tabs back to the normal horizontal placement. You’ll also notice that the location bar looks different, and that’s by design with Bespin.

Dirty

I’m including this screenshot because Amarok uses the application style a little differently than most apps, although yo may not notice much difference. I know I can’t but you may be more observant than I am.

And finally here’s a look at my main Application Launcher and the standalone Bespin configuration window. You can get most configuration done within the System Settings app but if you run the standalone tool you can configure a few extra settings and use the Demo window to show what the settings look like in several types of windows. To me that alone made me create a launcher for the standalone configuration tool. You’ll see it in my Favorites but I used an icon I’m not thrilled with. One one of these days I want to make the Bespin logo a little easier to see.

There is one downside to Bespin: There’s a lot to tweak but as of this writing the Bespin page on KDE-Look.org tells us that the Bespin Guide is still offline. It’s a shame, too, because I’d love to be able to at least look at the Guide. There’s a lot there that I honestly don’t know what it does.

As always I’d love to hear your comments, and if you have any questions feel free to ask them in the comments section.

Peng’s May 2012 desktop screenshots

As some of you may have heard, stupid me broke the LCD on my laptop a while back, and while I was able to use an external monitor for a while I lost that ability back in early March. (Long story, not worth dredging it back up.) I finally got a replacement laptop last month and while I could have simply pulled the hard drive from the old laptop and put it into the new one I decided to go with a fresh install of LMDE and KDE to clear out the cruft that had built up over the course of trying testing repos. Now that I finally have my laptop back up and running the way I like it I figure it’s time to post some new screenshots. First let me post some system stats so everyone can know what my baseline system is.

• Hardware: lenovo T61 laptop
• CPU: Intel Core2 Duo Centrino T9300 at 2.50GHz
• RAM: 3.81 GHz (according to the KInfocenter)
• Hard Drive: 149 GB
• Display: 14.1″ widescreen display running Nvidia Quadro NVS 140M graphics chips and the nvidia-glx 295.20-1 drivers
• Operating System: Linux Mint Debian Edition with Update Pack 4
• Desktop Environment: KDE 4.7.4
• Color Theme: Oxygen Cold
• Icon Theme: MIB-Ossigenco-Icons
• Desktop Theme: A custom theme based on Blend

Now for some screenshots.

Clean

The widgets seen on the desktop are, clockwise from the upper right

• Analog Clock
• Current Song
• Fortunoid
• Standard KDE lower panel, set to only as wide as it’s needed to serve as a “dock”
• Photo of the Day
• Notes

The icons on my panel are

• Kicker Application Launcher
• QuickAccess
• Shelf
• Color Picker
• Fancy Tasks (serving as a combination launcher bar and task manager)
• System Load Viewer
• Network Monitor
• System Tray
• Instant Rimshot
• Trashcan
• Pager
• Digital Clock

Dirty with web browser

You’ll see a broken image icon in my web browser. That slot normally shows the current 7 Day Forecast from WBZ TV here in Boston but I didn’t have a wi-fi signal when I took the picture so Chromium didn’t have an image to render. That’s what I get for taking desktop screenshots when I’m not online.

Dirty with system information

The terminal app at the top of the screen is Yakuake, my favorite KDE terminal app. You can also see my favorite apps and some of the icons in KDE’s System Settings app. The wallpaper in this shot is a custom image I made to celebrate Dodger Pride after hearing Magic Johnson invoke it when Guggenheim Baseball Management took ownership of the Los Angeles Dodgers earlier this month. Here’s a second “clean” shot that shows the wallpaper a little better.

For those wondering about my new laptop’s name, I decided not to reuse Kathryn or call the new one Kathryn II. Her name is Katia

[HOWTO] QuickTip: Prevent duplicate lines in your Bash history

if you’re like me you frequently use the command line to run commands and you use the arrow keys to let you reuse commands in your Bash history without having to type them all out. You may even know that you can manually edit the history by editing the ~/.bash_history file. When I was an Ubuntu user I enjoyed the fact that if you reuse the last command it doesn’t add the command to the history file but since moving to LMDE with KDE I’ve noticed that for some odd reason the .bash_history file can get Jabba-sized as a new line is added every time you run something in the terminal, even if I’m reusing the last command I ran.

Today I did a quick search on DuckDuckGo and found a way to prevent adding duplicate lines to your .bash_history file. Before we do anything else let’s open your .bash_history and clean it up a bit. Close every app you have open that uses Bash commands, whether it’s Konsole, Terminal, Yakuake or a terminal app on your dock and open ~/.bash_history in your favorite text editor. Go through it and remove duplicate lines, including duplicates spread throughout your history file.  Save it, and make a new file called ~/.bashrc if it doesn’t exist already. You can also  edit /etc/bash.bashrc as root but I prefer to use a bash configuration file in my home directory simply to make it easier to edit as needed. Add this line to the file

export HISTCONTROL=ignoredups

Save it and relaunch your terminal app and open ~/.bash_history in your text editor, or if you haven’t closed it reload the file and you will see that the reuse of the last command didn’t result in a duplicate line, although using lines above it will get lines entered if they’re previous commands in the file.

You can see more ways to customize your terminal usage in Customizing the Terminal: 5 Configuration Settings in Bash that makes you a CLI Power User, just note that where they say to use a file called ~/.bash_profile you should instead use ~/.bashrc, or at least that’s what I had to do on LMDE with KDE 4.7.4.

[HOWTO] Run scripts in KDE before KDE starts

One annoying little things about being a KDE user, whether I’m running LMDE or any other version of KDE is that it seems to ignore my setting to leave my system’s NumLock setting (on) alone when it starts. The problem is that KDM, the KDE Desktop Manager and also known as the Login Manager, loads in before the main part of KDE does so the BIOS setting is already changed by the time KDE ignores the possibility of changing the setting. Thanks to the good folks over at Make Tech Easier I’ve found a trick that fixes the misbehavior.

KDM has its own startup script called Xsetup, and will execute anything in that file before KDE itself launches. To make sure KDE turns on the NumLock, or to make sure it stays on, you can install an app called numlockx and use the app to turn the NumLock on before the main part of KDE even loads. To do this just follow these steps:

• Install numlockx. You can do it via a package manager or open up a Konsole window and run sudo apt-get install numlockx .
• Open Xsetup as root by pressing Alt-F2 (or whatever key combination you’ve set to launch the Run  Command Interface) and run kdesudo kate /etc/kde4/kdm/Xsetup .
• At the bottom of the file* add numlockx on and save the file.

That’s really all there is to it. The next time you boot your system into KDE the NumLock will be enabled for you automatically. Please remember that anything you put into Xsetup will be run as root and will be available to any user who boots into KDE on your computer so be very careful not to put anything into that file that could break your system. But you’re not restricted to using Xsetup for things like turning on your NumLock. The article from Make Tech Easier uses the example of configuring your display settings before KDE starts, and I’m sure there are other things that could be done this way.

*-If your Xsetup includes the line

x/sbin/initctl -q emit login-session-start DISPLAY_MANAGER=kdm

you want to put whatever you’re adding to the file before this line.

[HOWTO] QuickTip: Do you use the OxyXmas icons but can’t change the icon for Chromium on LMDE with KDE SC 4.7.2?

Earlier this week I installed the OxyXmas icons as part of my holiday decorations, but no matter what I did I couldn’t get the icon for Chromium to change. I finally looked at the settings in the Chromium desktop file (/usr/share/applications/chromium.desktop) and found the problem. There’s an icon for chromium-browser but not for chromium, which is how the browser is identified in LMDE. It turns out the fix is very simple.

• Download the OxyXmas tarball from KDE-Look.org if you don’t have it on your hard drive. Extract the tarball.
• Before creating the various icon sizes drill down to the OxyXmas/128x128/apps directory
• Copy the chromium-browser icon by manually copying it in Dolphin or by running cp chromium-browser.png chromium.png in the terminal
• Go back to the main OxyXmas directory
• In a terminal window working in the main oxyXmas directory run ./iconvert
• Install the icon theme via systemsettings or by copying the oxyXmas directory to /usr/share/icons/ or ~/.kde/share/icons (I prefer the latter)
• Open the System Settings dialog and go to Application Appearance > Icons and select the OxyXmas – OxySeasons Xmas-Theme and click Apply.

Voilà! You can now use the OxyXmas theme and show the Chromium icon sporting a jolly Santa hat.

How does my desktop look for the season? Here’s a clean shot:

And here’s a dirty shot:

Thanks to spacepenguin for creating this fun set of icons.

[HOWTO] Fixing Chromium on Linux Mint Debian Edition with KDE SC 4.7.2

Yesterday I wrote about updating to KDE SC 4.7.2 and the fact that Chromium broke thanks to a long known issue in Debian testing repos. My original fix was to install Google Chrome, but that wasn’t that great of a fix because I really want to run Chromium, not Chrome. Although running Chrome seems to fix the problem of missing the first character of Facebook status updates, which is a royal PITA. Today wayne128 shared a fix he uses to get past the “Aw snap!” messages.

NOTE: Please note that this fix uses an unusual source for getting the updated Chromium packages. If you add this source to your sources.list please disable it once you get Chromium installed to prevent other breakages.

The fix is to use a repository for aptosid. Before we add the repo let’s make a backup of your sources.list.

kdesudo cp /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.backup

Now open sources.list by running this command in your terminal

sudo kate /etc/apt/sources.list

Here’s the repo to add at the bottom of the list:

deb http://oscar.aptosid.com/debian/ sid main fix.main
#deb-src http://oscar.aptosid.com/debian/ sid main fix.main

You can leave the source code entry commented out or you can enable it by removing the “#” at the start of the line. Save and close the file and let’s get your package list updated.

sudo apt-get update

Let’s check to make sure your system can see the right version by running apt-cache policy chromium in your terminal. No sudo is needed for this command. You can ignore the version listed for Installed but the Candidate version should match this

~$ apt-cache policy chromium
chromium:
Installed: 15.0.874.106~r107270-1+c0.aptosid.1
Candidate: 15.0.874.106~r107270-1+c0.aptosid.1
Version table:
*** 15.0.874.106~r107270-1+c0.aptosid.1 0
500 http://oscar.aptosid.com/debian/ sid/fix.main amd64 Packages
500 ftp://ftp.spline.de/pub/aptosid/debian/ sid/fix.main amd64 Packages
100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
15.0.874.106~r107270-1 0
500 http://http.us.debian.org/debian/ unstable/main amd64 Packages
14.0.835.202~r103287-1 0
500 http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ testing/main amd64 Packages
~$

If the candidate version matches you’re ready to take the next step. If you already have Chromium (the browser) installed run sudo apt-get upgrade and make sure chromium is available to be upgraded.  Otherwise run sudo pat-get install chromium in your terminal. Either way you get Chromium 15.0.874.106~r107270-1+c0.aptosid.1 you can now launch it and be able to use the browser instead of being greeted with “Aw snap!” on every tab you open.

You’re almost done with the task. Before you go back to your web surfing open sources.list again and comment the lines you’ve added out by putting “#” at the start of each line. That way you won’t have to worry about getting prompted about updates you don’t need.  When Chromium gets fixed in Debian it should make the aptosid repos unnecessary, and if Debian updates it and you end up with the error messages again it will be an easy process of uncommenting the lines, getting aptosid’s newest packages and commenting them out again.

You can see wayne1287′s post itself on the Linux Mint Forums.

On a side note, you’ll see a number of packages being held back, and I wouldn’t worry about it. I’m not sure why the packages are being held back but I haven’t missed any held back package since I’ve done these updates. (If someone knows why they’re held back please leave it in the comments so we can get the info.) Updating and upgrading in the terminal will keep some packages held back but if you select all the updates in Synaptic they’ll be installed so I wouldn’t update with Synaptic if you’re running KDE SC 4.7.2 on Linux Mint.

[HOWTO] Get KDE SC 4.7.2 on Linux Mint Debian Edition, and a fix to the LMDE Chromium issue

[Updated 5 December to include an additional pair of apps  the broke with the upgrade. - Peng]

I love being able to run KDE on Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE), even if it is just KDE 4.6.5. I was able to install it without jumping through any hoops or using any repositories not counted among in the default Linux Mint software repos. Boo had been working on getting Linux Mint 11 KDE ready for release, but before we could get to a release candidate The Powers That Be realized that a ton of work would be needed to get Mint 11 KDE, based on Kubuntu, ready for release, and that rather than fix the problems they’d move Mint KDE to the LMDE base. Before that could start clem, the founder of Linux Mint, had to get LMDE Update Pack 3 released to the user base, and he needed to get Mint 12 out. Unfortunately before Mint 12 was released boo found that he couldn’t continue being the lead maintainer of Mint KDE any longer, so now all the work of getting LMDE KDE ready falls on clem’s plate, along with everything else he has to do.

But back in August I noticed a thread on the Linux Mint Forums called “KDE SC 4.7.2 enters Debian (only amd64).” Since Kathryn runs the amd64 version LMDE I was eager to get KDE 4.7.2, and all I needed to do first was get some other work out of the way and have some time to make sure the updates I would get wouldn’t break my system. This is especially important since the first step is to upgrade to the Debian Testing repos rather than using the Linux Mint Incoming repos and I was already seeing posts in a thread about broken apps in Testing upgrades. This wasn’t that big of a problem to me because I’ve run nightly and testing builds of software before and knew how to be careful. But there was a huge issue in the fact that I couldn’t find the information I needed to switch to the testing repos, the first step in getting ready to get KDE 4.7.2. Luckily GeneC gave me the information I was looking for, and since it was so hard to find I’m going to list the steps you need if you want to get KDE 4.7.2, or even just get packages from Debian Testing rather than even LMDE incoming.

Important: Please read the entire post and make sure you understand what you’ll be doing and have backed up your system before performing any of the steps I lay out. I’d hate to get you partway to the new KDE and have you stuck with something you don’t understand. Also, the KDE 4.7.2 update is a semi-official Debian-kde build so you’ll be using different repositories to get it. All the information on this release of KDE 4.7.2 is available on the qt-kde Debian site.

Disclaimer: These steps are not to be taken lightly. There is a very good chance that you may get an upgrade that breaks your system, leaving you to hunt for a fix (if there is one) or even having to reinstall LMDE all over again. If you’re not not comfortable with the risk of completely wrecking your computer don’t perform these steps. And even if you are willing to take that very real risk, check the latest posts in this thread on the Linux Mint Forums to see what problems are cropping up lately. Even if the coast looks clear think long and hard about taking these steps on the computer you use on a daily basis. And of course don’t forget the most important step: Back up your system before doing any of this.

You’re still here? You must be a glutton for punishment, and I’m not even going to make too many puns. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.) After you’ve backed up your system (I’m not kidding about that step), start by making sure your system is up to date by running this in your terminal:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

When you have made sure your system is up to date you need to back up your sources.list file before you start changing anything there. An easy way to backup the file is by running this command in a terminal

kdesudo cp /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.backup

Now open sources.list by running this command in your terminal

sudo kate /etc/apt/sources.list

Your current sources.list should contain entries very close to this:

deb http://packages.linuxmint.com/ debian main upstream import
deb http://debian.linuxmint.com/incoming testing main contrib non-free
deb http://debian.linuxmint.com/incoming/security testing/updates main contrib non-free
deb http://debian.linuxmint.com/incoming/multimedia testing main non-free

Comment out those lines, except for the very first line, by putting “#” as the very first character in each line (except the one for packages.linuxmint.com). Before you can snag the new KDE 4.7.2 packages you need to upgrade your system to use the Linux Mint Sid (testing) repos. First let’s get you updated to the Linux Mint Incoming repos. To do that add these lines at the bottom of your sources.list.

deb http://debian.linuxmint.com/incoming testing main contrib non-free
deb-src http://debian.linuxmint.com/incoming testing main contrib non-free

Save the file and update your package list and software again, and let’s apply the first batch of updates if you don’t have them already. Run this command in your terminal

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

The upgrade could take some time, so have some coffee or a soda, and a smoke if you are part of the wonderful group of folks on the planet that smoke. Don’t go too far though because the process will have some questions about the upgrades for you to answer. When it’s done you will probably need to apply more updates after rebooting your system. Why reboot your system? You may be getting updates that can only be applied with a system reboot, the only kind of updates and installs in Linux that require a reboot, unlike Windows’ insistence on reboots after installing anything. You may also have other updates waiting for you after the reboot, and apply them with

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

Make sure you’re happy with your system after the updates, and don’t apply any more updates from this post until you’re happy with how your system is operating. Did something break already? It’s time to hunt down what got broken and how to fix it. Once you are completely up to date with incoming and happy with your system you need to update your system to Mint Sid (unstable testing). Here’s where you can really hose your system, so don’t do the steps below unless you’re willing to risk making your system completely unusable. Ready to take the risk? Comment out the lines for the Testing repo and add these lines at the bottom of your sources.list

deb http://packages.linuxmint.com/ debian main upstream import backport
deb http://security.debian.org/ testing/updates main contrib non-free
deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org sid main non-free
deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian/ unstable main contrib non-free

Update and upgrade again, and again this could take some time and it could have some questions for you to answer again. Reboot your system after it’s done because once again you’ve got updates that can’t be applied and used until you reboot your system. Again, make sure you’re happy with how your system operates, and if you’re not bookmark this page and come back to it after you’ve resolved the problems you’ve discovered.

/me fires up the David Wax Museum and enjoys their tunes while you take care of your new issues

Welcome back. Everything copacetic now? Cool. Let’s get you KDE 4.7.2. Backup your sources list again, and if you’ve done other things since you got Sid installed backup your system again, just to be on the safe side. Like I said at the top of the post, this update isn’t coming from the standard Debian repos, so you’ll need to add the appropriate repos to your sources.list file. Open the file and see if you have the following lines, and if so remove them.

deb http://qt-kde.debian.net/debian experimental-snapshots main
deb-src http://qt-kde.debian.net/debian experimental-snapshots main

deb http://qt-kde2.debian.net/debian experimental-snapshots main
deb-src http://qt-kde2.debian.net/debian experimental-snapshots main

Update your system again with

sudo apt-get update

and let’s tell your system that the packages from those repos are trusted. Run this line in your terminal

sudo apt-get install pkg-kde-archive-keyring

Once it’s installed update your package list and make sure your system is updated one more time with

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Everything green? Let’s get you upgraded to KDE 4.7.2. This update is different from most upgrades you run, including dist-upgrades. This time you want to run

sudo apt-get -t experimental-snapshots dist-upgrade

This upgrade could be the longest of the bunch, and you’ll definitely need to stay close by to answer some questions the upgrade process will ask you. When it’s all done go ahead and do one more reboot to apply the last set of upgrades. When you log back in your desktop may not look all that different, but checking About KDE in System Settings will have a new version number for you to see. Here are a pair of screenshots of my system after the upgrade.

Clean

Dirty

Updated 5 December: It turns out two other apps died with this upgrade. Electric Sheep broke because I had to reinstall xscreensaver. The wallpaper finder and changer app Webilder also broke, but this is due to the fact that python-appindicator is not available in my current repos. Unfortunately I don’t see a way to fix it

What the hell happened to my Chromium???

There’s one big casualty in the upgrade process to KDE 4.7.2, and that’s the fact that the Chromium browser is borked. Every time you launch chromium-browser all your pages show the “Snap!” error, even the preferences page. It’s a known issue and to fix it you’ll have to install Google Chrome instead. The Google Linux repos are borked so you’ll have to install the it manually. Go to the Google Chrome website and download the package. Open the directory you downloaded it into and run this command in Terminal

sudo dpkg-i google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb

You can also install the package from Dolphin by double-clicking it, but if it opens in Ark you need to install a package.

sudo apt-get install gdebi-kde

That package will let you install packages with a graphical installer. Many Linux hate using graphical package installers like this, but it’s a matter of personal preference. I love being able to use Gdebi and had to do some searching to find it when I installed KDE on top of LMDE.

There’s one more thing to to before you launch Chrome for the first time. You’ll want to import your Chromium settings into Chrome, but there’s no settings import option that I was able to find. Luckily it’s easy to do. Just copy everything from ~/.config/chromium/ into ~/.config/google-chrome and all of your settings from Chromium will be available in Chrome, including your passwords, cookies, extensions and search engine settings.

[HOWTO] QuickTip: Change the image for the cap on KDE4′s desktop cube

KDE4 is known partly for it’s lovely eye candy, and one of the things former GNOME users love is the ability to have a desktop cube like you can have in Compiz. The one problem is that while you can change the background image (like Compiz’s skydome) you can’t change the image use for the top and bottom of the cube.

Except that’s not entirely accurate,it turns out. I did some searching to see if I could find any way to replace the image and I found two different sites with the information I needed, one in Italian and one in English. Here are the steps you need  to follow.

• Open your favorite image editor and create or resize an image so that it measures 800×800 pixels. Make sure the image has a transparent layer . In Gimp you want to use Layer > Translucency > Add Alpha Channel. Save the file with the name cubecap.png.
• Copy the file to /usr/share/kde4/apps/kwin, replacing the image already there. I strongly recommend making a copy of the current cubecap.png so you have it in the event you want to get back to the default.
• Open the Desktop Effects settings, select the Desktop Cube effect and open the configuration window by clicking on the wrench button. Go to the Advanced tab and clear the checkbox for Display image on caps, then then check it again. Click on OK to close out the settings dialog.
• Hit the key combination for using the desktop cube, Ctrl-F11is the default, and drag your cube down to show the cube cap. Voilà! If you did everything correctly you will see your new cube cap.

You will have the same image on the top and bottom of your cube, and unlike with Compiz there’s no way to use different images for the top and bottom of your cube, but at least you can change the image you use for your cube cap.

If you use a desktop sphere rather than a cube you can see KRAM’s post on the PC Pitstop Forums for information on not only how to change your car but also how to fit your image for the desktop sphere.

Thanks to KRAM for the English language instructions and to NiCo on the Mandriva International Backups forum for the Italian version of the instructions. that first showed me the change was possible.

[RESOLVED] Can someone help diagnose my Plymouth bootsplash issue?

Update 27 Nov 9:40a ET: I found a solution to my issue on the Linux Mint Forums. It turns out the instructions I read on the KDE-Looks page for Kmint seem to be missing some important steps. I’ve added them at the bottom of this post.

Update 28 Apr 2012: Stupid me just realized I had used a placeholder for the name of the file you need for Kmint but never actually went back and replaced it with the file name. Sorry about the confusion.

I got tired of the scrolling text boot on my LMDE laptop and installed Plymouth, but it’s looking pretty funky to me. I had been using the Kmint Plymouth bootsplash theme but it’s showing up as blank except for the progress bar on the bottom left of the screen and distro information (that isn’t even completely accurate) on the lower right. I switched to the solar theme from the package plymouth-themes-all but the same thing happened. I shot this video to show what I’m getting.

Sorry about the video quality and the lack of audio, but that’s what I got on my Samsung Restore (on Virgin Mobile). As the video shows I get the progress bar at the lower left corner, and other than the progressing bar I get the Debian version info on the lower right but nothing else until my Ksplash kicks in. Does anyone know what I may be doing wrong? If anyone needs more info just ask in the comments and I’ll add it to the post.

Oops! After posting this I remembered I took some screenshots that may help show the issue.  These two pics show the Kmint Plymouth theme.

I got it resolved, and here are the steps I hadn’t known about:

Install instructions

1) Install plymouth

sudo apt-get install plymouth plymouth-drm

2) Download and untar file for LifeInTheGrey’s Plymouth theme from  his original post on this Linux Mint Forums thread.

Download the attached zip file and expand it to /usr/share/plymouth/themes/

3) Set the theme

sudo plymouth-set-default-theme lmde

4) Modify grub to see the splash

gksudo gedit /etc/default/grub

Change:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet"
to
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

5) Update initramfs and grub

sudo update-initramfs -u && sudo update-grub

Bam, you’re good to go! 

You may need to restart a couple of times to get the changes registered. It took me two reboots to see the bootsplash. I’m changing my Plymouth theme one more time to get the Kmint theme enabled and I’ll snag a screenshot to show how it looks for me.  Here’s my Plymouth with a modified Kmint. I added a background while trying to get the issue resolved so it will look different from what’s on your system.

I’m not sure why I can’t get the statusbar, so I’ll have to dig some more. Here’s the lmde Plymouth theme, complete with the statusbar. I’ll be using it as my reference as I try to ID my last issues with the Kmint them. I will be passing my findings along to hellokitten, the dev of the Kmint theme.

Yoooouge thanks to LifeInTheGrey for the missing info.

[HOWTO] QuickTip: Install packages graphically on LMDE running KDE

Just a quick post to pass something along I just discovered. When I got my laptop with LMDE on it I had no problem double-clicking on Debian packages I had snagged and having Gdebi launch so I could install them, but the moment I installed KDE I lost that ability and couldn’t figure out how to get it back. Yes, I know I could install packages from the command line with a simple sudo dpkg -i [package name], but that’s a bit of a pain in the rear for someone who prefers to use GUIs for things whenever he can.

This morning I was checking out the latest post on Linux Mint 12 on the Mint blog and I noticed that “packages now open with gdebi” and just on a whim I fired up the Software manager and did a search for “gdebi.” Sure enough, I found gdebi-kde, and installed it, then I checked my theory by double clicking on a package I had installed. As I hoped, Gdebi opened in a window and asked me if I wanted to install the packge.

I’m a happy penguinista.