Archive:Getting Started/Run/Full Session

Full KDE 4 session

To run a full KDE 4 desktop environment session, you can either start it from the command line as you normally would, with something like this:

X :1 & export DISPLAY=:1
startkde

Note

If the X server refuses the connection saying something like: Xlib: connection to ":1.0" refused by server, try X -ac :1 instead.

or you can can add it to your login manager. If you are using KDM (or a compatible login manager) this is done by creating a .desktop file in either `kde-config --prefix`/share/apps/kdm/sessions/ or in /usr/share/xsessions/. The easiest thing to do is to copy an existing kde.desktop file and name it kde4.desktop. Open this new .desktop file in a text editor and change the Exec, TryExec and Name entries to look something like this:

Exec=$HOME/kde/bin/startkde
TryExec=$HOME/kde/bin/startkde
Name=KDE4

Replace $HOME/kde in the example above with the prefix you are installing KDE4 into.

After restarting the login manager (Alt+e in KDM) this new entry should appear in the sessions menu.

You might have to edit your startkde scripts, ie: change

this

kdehome=$HOME/.kde

to this

kdehome=$HOME/.kde4

or paste this

export KDEDIR=`kde4-config --prefix`
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$KDEDIR/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
export PATH=$KDEDIR/bin/:$PATH
export KDEHOME=~/.kde4

on top.

Note

You should have path to 'qdbus' program (usually it is $QTDIR/bin) in your $PATH to login successfully. If it is not there, you'll get an error message "Could not start DBus. Check your installation."