Today I bit the bullet and upgraded my debian testing box to kde4. At first try, I ended up running kde4 on a kde3.5 background with kicker (the menu and icon bar applet) removed – quite frustrating.
plasma to the rescue:
apt-get install kdebase-workspace-bin kdebase-workspace-data kdebase-runtime plasma-widgets-workspace kdebase-data kdebase-runtime-data
drew in what I needed – well that is, I guess I’ll need a few more things, but so far, it looks good and I can start and control applications.
Well – that is, until I logged out. Then kdm just gave me a ‘default X’ screen, greyish hash with an large X cursor. So then kdm was up for an upgrade, after which I was up for a surprise. I could not log in any more. When logging in the screen went black for a moment and there I was – back to kdm. Lots of googling to no avail. I tried to make a new user to make sure that none of my old kde3 settings was messing things up – but still no luck. At the end I bit (yet another) bullet and installed gdm and lo and behold, everything works fine, even user switching – that some people claims should not work when running a gdm / kde combo.