Arch Linux

FrozenFox

Member

From: College Station, TX

Registered: 2008-03-23

Posts: 422

Website

KDE4 Quirk Fixes: Desktop Servicemenus & GTK Themes

Since I have spent quite some time with frustration trying to get kde 4.2 to work properly, I finally solved 2 of my most annoying problems. I figured this might help someone else out, so it couldn't hurt to post. Note that both of these are rather hackish solutions, but until better ways come about, they work just fine for me and probably will for you. I'm not sure which of these are caused by actual bugs as opposed to something I don't understand yet, so I will hold off on reporting them until I'm sure.

Servicemenus:

If you've noticed that you -can't- unzip/unrar/untar for some reason ONLY on the desktop (presumably in folderview as well, since the desktop is just a folderview plugin of sorts), I seem to have figured out why and how to work around it. I noticed at random that somehow my Root Actions Servicemenu was working, which no right click menus had been before. I was baffled. In looking around for a solution with the hope of getting my others to work, I removed the ark* servicemenus from /usr/share/kde4/services/ServiceMenus/  (the kdemod4 servicemenus folder. it may be diff for normal kde4) and installed extract-compress-servicemenu-kde4 from AUR. Good news -- on logging out and in, i had a compress menu on right click. Buuuuuuuut...no extract. Which renders it virtually useless for me. After all sorts of looking around, comparing, trial and error, it seems that (confirmed by doing it to 4 different non-working servicemenus) the argument %F is not accepted in 4.2 servicemenus on the desktop/folderview and they just don't show up at all. Replacing %F with %U in the servicemenus and logging out and in.. magic! Being able to extract files without manually opening konqueror or Ark, via right click! With the desktop backend and easy servicemenus working, the desktop is finally useful again. YAY. I confirmed this by doing the same thing to 4 different previously-not-working servicemenus, which had been converted from KDE3 via this:

#sudo cp /opt/kde/share/apps/konqueror/servicemenus/* /usr/share/kde4/services/ServiceMenus/  use this line to copy from kdemod3 dir to kdemod4 dir
#copy your other servicemenus to the corresponding dir above
cd /usr/share/kde4/services/ServiceMenus/ #for kdemod4
sudo sed -i "s/\[Desktop Entry\]/\[Desktop Entry\]\nType=Service/" *
sudo sed -i "s/ServiceTypes\=/ServiceTypes\=KonqPopupMenu\/Plugin\,/" *

This helpful botch of a previously good script (tweaked to fit my system, pathetically hardcoded to take from kdemod3 and give to kdemod4) was taken from here:

http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.ph … tent=80131

SO:

1) Convert the servicemenu from kde3 if it's not a kde4 one already with the above stuff.
2) Replace %F with %U. Another argument may suffice. Note that this could possibly screw stuff up if you attempt to do multiple files, but as a workaround, at least it makes things work!
3) log out and in

GTK Themes:

It seems that systemsettings->appearance->colors->options->apply colors to non-kde4 apps screws up the colors on the system for gtk apps. Gtk-qt-engine didn't work for me whatsoever (ended in an ugly flat theme) when installed and activated in systemsettings/appearance with qtcurve-kde4, and gtk-kde4 turned the text green and screwed up some things. I couldn't fix the former, but disabling what seems to be the logical setting to use in the settings manager seems to fix the text problems, and somehow they were the colors they should have been.

Alternatively, use identical (qtcurve or oxygen) themes on gnome/gtk and kde4/qt and use lxappearance as said in the wiki to set them to be the same, using the color disabling given above.

Last edited by FrozenFox (2009-02-01 10:51:11)