Welcome back! As long as everything went well last time, you should have a basic Arch Linux set up with KDE 4.3.x. Your KDE installation should have a text editor (kate), a command terminal (konsole), and some basic Plasmoids for your desktop. Unfortunately, the desktop we have set up so far isn’t very useful, because we haven’t added that many applications yet. In this chapter, we’ll fix that.
Make Sure You’re Up To Date
Before we go on, make sure all of the packages you have now are all up to date. If your kernel updates during this process, make sure you reboot. Execute the following command to update your system:
sudo pacman -Syu
After that, your system should be up to date. Now, we’re ready to continue!
GTK Integration
First, let’s take care of something that I find very annoying. KDE uses the Qt toolkit for its apps, and GNOME uses GTK+. The problem here is that if you install a GTK+ application (I am actually going to recommend a few) it will look out of place in KDE. So to fix this ahead of time, first enter the following command with Konsole:
sudo pacman -S qtcurve-gtk2 gtk-qt-engine
You should then be able to go to System Settings > GTK Styles and set the theme for GTK apps to qtcurve which will create a uniform look. You may have to log out and log in before that takes effect, though.
Let’s Install Some Apps!
Now it’s time to have some fun and install some applications. You can either do this in Konsole with the pacman command, or you can install Shaman (sudo pacman -S shaman) to have a GUI to install packages with. When it comes to Shaman, it doesn’t show a progress indication while it downloads packages, so I don’t use it much. To install packages with pacman, enter the command “sudo pacman -S” followed by the names of any packages you want to install with spaces in between. Here is an example:
sudo pacman -S shaman pidgin k3b
The command above will install three packages, shaman, pidgin, and k3b. We could have added a bunch more, or just typed the name of a single package if we wanted to. Now, I’m going to create a list of packages I recommend installing with the appropriate package names in parenthesis. You can add the package names to your “pacman -S” command to install the ones you want.
Firefox (firefox)
Firefox isn’t actually a KDE app, so why am I listing it here? In my opinion, using a browser that’s cross platform is a better idea because you can use the same browser despite whatever operating system you happen to be using. Firefox works on Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows off the top of my head. Even better, you can add the “Foxmarks” plugin and synchronize your bookmarks across computers.
Konqueror (kdebase-konqueror)
Konqueror is another web browser, and is the one that KDE uses as default. It can also browse files and other things too, giving it the title of KDE’s “swiss army knife”. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have support for Firefox plugins as far as I know, and it’s KDE-specific. (There is a Windows installer, but it’s not ready for mass adoption in my opinion).
K3b (k3b)
K3b is KDE’s disc authoring tool, allowing you to burn CD’s, DVD’s, and a bunch of other things. It can even burn Linux ISO images and has a ton of features. If you have a CD/DVD burner, make sure you install this.
OpenOffice (openoffice-base)
Most people know what Open Office is by now, it’s a really great productivity suite for things such as word processing, spreadsheets, you name it. There is at least one other Open Office package available (I believe it’s called go-openoffice, or something like that) but I’ve had all kinds of problems with it. The package openoffice-base is the one you want.
KTorrent (ktorrent)
If you download torrents, KTorrent is a good choice. It seems to crash for me if I use the search plugin, though. Other than that it’s very solid and integrates well into KDE.
KDE’s Folder View Plasmoid (kdebase-plasma)
Trust me, you’ll want the Folder View plasmoid. You can use it to show a directory right on your desktop, and you can browse the folders contained in it without even clicking your mouse.
Pidgin (pidgin)
Pidgin isn’t a KDE app, but in my opinion, it’s the best instant message client out there. KDE uses Kopete as it’s default for this purpose, but it isn’t cross platform so I prefer Pidgin. If you’d rather have a KDE-exclusive environment, install kdenetwork-kopete instead.
Thunderbird (thunderbird)
Another non-KDE app, but I really love Thunderbird, it’s a great email client. If you need email functionality, this is the app you want. If you’d rather have a KDE-exclusive environment, install kdepim-kmail instead.
WICD (wicd)
If you use wireless internet, make sure you install WICD along with your wireless card driver. KDE doesn’t currently have a network manager that’s worth using, so even though WICD isn’t a KDE app, it’s the only choice you really have, and it works VERY well. In most cases and on most cards, it can have your wireless connection up before you even log in!
Gimp (gimp)
If you like to edit photos or draw on your Linux box, make sure you get Gimp. It’s an awesome program.
Digikam (digikam)
Since we’re on the subject of images, Digikam is the perfect compliment to any photographer’s computer. It sorts your photos and let’s you do all sorts of cool things.
KDEnlive (kdenlive)
KDEnlive is a great program for editing video. If editing video is something that you do, make sure you get this program.
Gwenview (kdegraphics-gwenview)
For simply viewing images, Gwenview is perfect for the job. It will allow you to simply view images, but it also allows you to create slideshows as well. Very cool.
Okular (kdegraphics-okular)
Okular is KDE’s PDF viewer. If you need to view PDF’s, install Okular on your system.
KDiskFree (kdeutils-kdf)
KDiskFree is a pretty cool program that shows you how much space each of your drives/partitions are using so you can monitor disk usage on your system.
Amarok (amarok)
If you are a fan of music, you definitely want to make sure you install Amarok. It’s a great music collection organizer and player.
Juk (kdemultimedia-juk)
Juk is a music manager/player like Amarok, but way more stripped down. If you need a basic music player instead of something with a ton of features like Amarok, try Juk.
Dragon Player (kdemultimedia-dragonplayer)
Dragon is a player for your video files. It’s one of two main programs in KDE used for this purpose.
Kaffeine (kaffeine)
Kaffeine is another great video player for KDE. I recommend to install both Kaffeine and Dragon to see which one you like better. There are actually a ton of video players available to you, so you can also search for VLC, Xine, and MPlayer and try those out too.
Virtualbox
If you want to set up some virtual machines, Virtualbox is the way to go. To install it, I recommend downloading the package from here (download the 64-bit or 32-bit version, depending on your version of Arch) and run the command “sudo pacman -U Virtual*” without the quotes to install it locally from where you downloaded it.
Install Everything
In case you wanted to just install everything I’ve mentioned in one step, execute the following command (copy and paste into Konsole):
sudo pacman -S firefox kdebase-konqueror k3b openoffice-base ktorrent pidgin thunderbird wicd gimp digikam kdenlive kdegraphics-gwenview kdegraphics-okular kdeutils-kdf amarok kdemultimedia-juk kdemultimedia-dragonplayer kaffeine kdebase-plasma
Please note, it could take a while to download all of that depending on your connection.
Some Problems You *Might* Encounter
Unfortunately, I’m having a few minor problems with my Arch/KDE set up, and you may also inherit these problems because I currently don’t know how to fix them. First of all, when I save files on my desktop, they don’t appear until I manually refresh. Secondly, every time I install a program, I have to log out and log in for it to show up on the menu. This is not normal KDE behavior, and I suspect that it’s due to a bug in KDE 4.3.2. Hopefully when KDE 4.3.3 is released (I wrote this when 4.3.2 was the newest version) it will possibly fix these problems. Please let me know in the comments if you have these problems or not, maybe we can track down a fix.
Conclusion
Now, you should have an Arch Linux system that is fully functional. You can also install more applications if you want, and customize it even further. Next time, in the final chapter, it’s time to do some gaming!
Arch “Ultimate KDE Desktop” Series History:
Click here to read part 1
Click here to read part 2
Jeremy is a Certified IT Technician that blogs at ITNewsToday.com in his spare time. He has over ten years of industry experience, and studies the IT industry every single day. Jeremy has become an open source enthusiast over time and is studying for his Linux+ certification. He lives in Waterford MI with his wife Krystal and son Alan.
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Just a quick note from another Arch user.
If you go into the Menu Editor and just hit save, and then exit, it will add the new items to your menu without having to log off.
Thank you. Do we know why that happens though? I imagine it can be fixed, because Kubuntu seems to be fine.
I’m not quite sure why it happens, that’s just a work-around I have found that seems to make the issue easier to deal with.
A quick post in the forums will probably point you in the right direction. Arch has one of the best user bases.
I find KNetworkManager (recently released for kde 4) to be excellent; and it seems to be much more stable and reliable for me than wicd ever was.
Thank you, I wasn’t aware that was released for Arch. I thought it was Kubuntu only until KDE 4.4. When I looked a while back it wasn’t there, so maybe this is a brand new inclusion?
A few recommendations from another Arch user :
1. Arora browser – very lightweight, very fast browser. No plugins, no feature bloat. Many pages rendered incorrectly by Firefox are rendered properly. Its good to have one gecko based and one webkit baseed browser.
2. Kontact suit of apps instead of just kmail. you also get addressbook, calendar, todo list and rss feed reader all integrated nicely.
any chance your desktop is a symlink somewhere? https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=213799 just wondering because I found out that there’s a nasty little bug in dolphin affecting symlinks… but since I don’t know where the code is… it could be in kdelibs and a affecting everything from plasma to dolphin
I don’t think so. I think that there is a bug and other distro’s like Kubuntu may have known a work around.
Arch truely is one of the best Linux distrobutions I’ve tried, I’ve been using it for 2 years and love it, it’s taught me so much.
There is absolutely no need for that old ugly gtk-qt-engine hack. You already have QGtkStyle available since it is integrated into QT from version 4.5.
How does that work? I’ve never seen an option for the GTK styles at all unless the packages I mentioned are installed.