Setting of new login screen for kde dysfunctional

Hello,

yesterday I met a colleague on the floor, who told me that after looking at the jailhouse theme of Suse 11.4 (I guess that’s
a kind of curtain? it really is remarkably ugly) he switched to Ubuntu. So well, I won’t go that far, but now I thought, let’s
switch the login-screen for something better.

Okay, I go to System Settings / System Administration / Login Screen, tab Theme.
Alright, there are six themes there, but I don’t like them. Great, there is “Get New Theme”!
Okay, I get one. But the list of themes doesn’t change — I would have expected, that the new
theme would now be automatically included. So well, a bit stupid, but apparently it wants you
to explicitly include it: so I click “Install new theme” — unfortunately, then there is no hint
where the themes have been stored! Okay, I download another one, hoping that during that
process I will be told what happens. Alas, there was a chance for such enlightenment with KDE3,
but likely no longer with KDE4 (which seems to go the Windows route, hiding everything; with the
little difference that under Windows the basic things actually work). So no hint where it stores these
login themes. Okay, I search the Internet, find various possibilities, /usr, /etc, and ~/.kde, ~/.kde4, but
in none of them can I find these themes! (I found the desktop themes, and I found the six themes which were already there,
but not the new themes).

So could somebody tell my where KDE hides the newly downloaded themes?

By the way, the information under “Help” seems either irrelevant or outdated (the directories mentioned
seem false anyway).

In general, I think most(!) KDE problems would be solved if KDE would be more “verbose”, enlighten the user
about its actions (while on the other hand, at least KDE4 seems to have the goal of “never say anything”).

Thanks for your attention

Frustrated Oliver

(Since September 2010 I try to become friends with KDE4, where I was really satisfied with KDE3.
But actually my dissatisfaction grows … by the way, I’m using KDE 4.6.0 under Suse 11.4.)

It might try to save them in /usr/share/kde4/apps/kdm/themes but fails because users don’t have write access to this directory.
Download a KDM4 theme (a tar.gz archive), then click on “Install new theme” and enter the location of this archive. It will be extracted in /usr/share/kde4/apps/kdm/themes and will appear on the list of themes where you can select it.

Regarding the KDE-bug:
This is Bug 255453 https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=255453
This is now 10 months open, and in this time they didn’t manage to fix
such a minor issue.

Would be great if Suse would support the real alternative to KDE, the Trinity desktop.

The workaround: As you suggest, when using “Install new theme” then
one is asked for the root password, and it installs it at
/usr/share/kde4/apps/kdm/themes
where it now appears in the menu.

So the trivial fix for KDE would be to move this stuff somewhere to .kde (or .kde4 or whatever).
Since 10 months they are not able to do this. I think that says something.

Nevertheless, thanks!

Oliver

Sigh, setting of the login screen seems to work w.r.t. “System Settings”
(using the work-around), but that only appears so — actually it has no bearings
on the login screen — always the same (the Suse jailhouse).

So apparently the login screen is not controlled by KDE (KDE only thinks so)?
However in Yast there is nothing about the login screen?

You’re right. It looks like an openSUSE sysconfig trick. Try to change the theme from Yast with the sysconfig editor:
Desktop
–> Display manager
------> DISPLAYMANAGER_KDM_THEME

It works. But you have to restart kdm, meaning either log in into console, kill the kdm process and restart kdm, or just reboot.

The theme defined here:

grep THEME /etc/sysconfig/displaymanager

has priority over the one defined here:

grep Theme /usr/share/kde4/config/kdm/kdmrc

because of that :

# grep -A 6 DISPLAYMANAGER_KDM_THEME /usr/share/kde4/apps/kdm/read_sysconfig.sh
if  -n "$DISPLAYMANAGER_KDM_THEME" -a -d "/usr/share/kde4/apps/kdm/themes/$DISPLAYMANAGER_KDM_THEME" ]; then
  echo "Theme=/usr/share/kde4/apps/kdm/themes/$DISPLAYMANAGER_KDM_THEME"
  echo "UseTheme=true"
  echo "UseBackground=false"
else
  echo "UseTheme=false"
  echo "UseBackground=true"
fi

Typically openSUSE. :wink:

I see, one has to list first the directory where “System Settings” stored the themes:


> ls /usr/share/kde4/apps/kdm/themes/
circles  ethais  horos  KDM-Inferno  oranger  oxygen  oxygen-air  SUSE  W1ld0neKDM4

in order to find out how the theme is actually called (the theme-names listed in the System-Settings-menu
are not usable), and then use the selected theme as value for variable DISPLAYMANAGER_KDM_THEME.

This should finally work, but I can’t try it out right now — in order to see the login-screen I guess I have to log out,
but I have a process running.

In general, shouldn’t openSuse just remove their settings for the display manager?
I would guess it is a remains from a time where KDE did not have the settings for the
“login manager”. Or should KDE remove their settings?

Thanks anyway!

Oliver

So, I logged in now again, and the new (nicer) login screen appeared. We got that working, thanks again.
(During the KDE startup phase the old Suse wallpaper re-appeared for some time, but so well …)

Oliver