Arch Linux

Blackened Justice

Member

Registered: 2012-02-11

Posts: 19

Qt-oriented desktop recommendations needed

Hey everyone,

As some of you probably know, I've installed a couple of Arch distros on my system in the last few days, first a regular Arch, but then decided to give ArchBang a shot, since I loved CrunchBang quite a bit. Well, I like it, but I don't feel the same sort of feeling I had when I installed the regular Arch, having a pre-prepared environment is somewhat boner-killing

Well, I've been migrating, in general, from Gnome/GTK+ oriented environments to KDE/Qt oriented environments, mainly because of my interest in developing using the Qt framework. So in my first Arch install, I "chickened out", and just got the kde-base package, which solved pretty much every problem I would have to solve if I instead had decided to go with a more modular approach. Well, that's the kind of approach I want right now, and so I need some recommendations

Basically, I want a KDE-less Qt environment. I've been looking into DEs and WMs, razor-Qt and eggwm sounded promising enough. I still haven't decided whether to go with a DE+WM type of environment or just a WM+stuff (panels and docks) type of environment. No DM needed, I'll be the single user and can have it boot straight to X if needed. Any other things I should take into account?

If my thinking is correct, this is my upgrade procedure after installing the Arch base:
Adding and configuring a user.
Install packer (using wget and building the package), in order to have easy access to the AUR stuff.
Install the xorg stuff, xorg-server xorg-xinit xorg-utils xorg-server-utils.
Install Qt (and qtcreator, qt-docs and qt-private-headers).
Then install whatever stuff I need from the repositories and AUR (if I decide to go with what's above, razor-qt and eggwm).
Then configure the various rc files to boot straight into the above described x environment.
Then install some sort of network utility, etc.

Any suggestions and recommendations? Is my thinking correct?

Cheers

Blackened Justice

Member

Registered: 2012-02-11

Posts: 19

Re: Qt-oriented desktop recommendations needed

Okay, I have succeeded to get my system up and running
I have razor-qt running with openbox instead of eggwm, I tried it out for a bit, but it seemed still a bit too limited. So I went with the tried and true

Well, now I have a couple of questions:

1) Besides qtcurve, is there any other theme/engine I can install to tweak the appearance of Qt? And how can I install qtcurve themes? Note that I don't want any kde nor gtk/gnome dependencies.

2) Openbox themes are distributed mostly in the form of .obt files, which are then used by GUI apps such as obconf. Now, I don't want to install obconf because of the gtk dependencies, so is there any way I can just directly extract the .obt files into my /usr/share/themes directory?

Cheers

Mikko777

Member

From: Suomi, Finland

Registered: 2006-10-30

Posts: 837

Re: Qt-oriented desktop recommendations needed

1) Besides qtcurve, is there any other theme/engine I can install to tweak the appearance of Qt? And how can I install qtcurve themes? Note that I don't want any kde nor gtk/gnome dependencies.
Cheers

bespin, quantumstyle http://kde-look.org/content/show.php/Qu … ent=101088 ,
qtcurve, oxygen, gtk style, phase, cleanlooks etc seem to be the "default" stylemanagers.

PS. Whats the point of using razor-qt and such? when i tried it wasnt any faster than full blown kde just lacked all the cool stuff.

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ShadowKyogre

Member

From: Hell! XP No... I'm not telling

Registered: 2008-12-19

Posts: 476

Website

Re: Qt-oriented desktop recommendations needed

Technically you could write an *.qss file and add "-stylesheet <path/to/sheet.qss>" to the commandline options for each of your Qt applications, but it's probably not what you're looking for. (For more information, see this: http://developer.qt.nokia.com/doc/qt-4. … heet.html) A qss file is basically a css file oriented towards Qt widgets.

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Teho

Member

Registered: 2010-01-30

Posts: 200

Re: Qt-oriented desktop recommendations needed

I don't know what's your beef with KDE but if it has anything to do with memory usage:

Plasma Desktop, KWin and Oxygen with under 80MB of memory. It probably wouldn't take much effor to go below 60. I started Dolphin, Konsole, Rekonq, Gwenview, Bangarang and System Monitor and it went up to 130MB. The difference between the most lightweight environments is probably 20-30MB. There's nothign that would cause CPU wake-ups either. Everything starts instantly on single-core virtualbox environment with 256MB of memory.