KDE 4.3 upgrade and Cashew

I reinstalled KDE for an upgrade from 4.2 to 4.3 (doesn’t seem to work without uninstalling on Gentoo; no idea why) and ran into some problems afterwards.

reinstalling KDE

I was still using the unstable KDE 4.2 until this weekend. For some strange reason, the slotted 4.2 ebuilds were completely removed from portage, thus preventing any re-merges which I had to do since I wanted to also upgrade from GCC 4.1.2 to 4.3.4, so I had to uninstall KDE before, upgrade GCC, recompile everything, then finally merge KDE again. To remove KDE more or less completely I was told to do emerge -pCv $(qlist -ICv kde | grep 4.2) (minus the pv of course). I had some other ebuilds left for manual checking but this command caught the vast majority. Unmerging and remerging kde-meta (after the GCC upgrade) went really smooth. To have a WM in the meantime I emerged xfce4-meta and gnome-terminal before I unmerged KDE.

Akonadi migration with bogus entry

Recently I had issues with some corrupted config in Akonadi that could not be solved from within KDE 4.2. On every start I would now get the migration dialog retrying to migrate a bridge called Y2252jgYO7 – whatever that was, I couldn’t find it. Running locate on that ID revealed old lock files back from KDE 3.5. Having searched for a moment I figured out that I could simply find and remove the files:

find ~/.kde* -iname \*Y2252jgYO7\* -exec rm \{\} \;

Next, everything referencing that ID has to be removed from ~/.kde4/share/config/kres-migratorrc – redo whatever runs the migration assistant for you and the problem should be solved.

frenzy Nepomuk – again…

I don’t seem to be the only one where the desktop search never works. With KDE 4.2 I disabled Strigi and Nepomuk because it took 100% CPU even when idling. If it wasn’t idling it was accessing the harddisk way too fast and so it always slowed down my system. That wasn’t without sideeffects however: I was unable to use the runner (Alt+F2) without crashes. I figured out that enabling Nepomuk, disabling Strigi and removing all repository data worked in KDE 4.2. Guess what? The problem reappeared after the upgrade to KDE 4.3. I don’t know if I solved it “properly” (I don’t need desktop search ATM so I can afford disabling it). From Stéphane Laurière at Mandriva’s bug tracker:

1. make a backup of your Nepomuk database by backuping the folder ~/.kde4/share/apps/nepomuk/repository/
2. reconfigure Strigi from the Nepomuk System Settings so that it indexes less
   folders
   Note: I unchecked everything plus added * to the exclude patterns, just to be sure.
3. stop Nepomuk by running the following command:
   qdbus org.kde.NepomukServer /nepomukserver org.kde.NepomukServer.quit
4. remove the repository folder ~/.kde4/share/apps/nepomuk/repository/
5. restart Nepomuk: nepomukserver

After restart I got several crashes (what else) but Nepomuk stops retrying after a short time… (you should watch out for large numbers of crash logs though)

the Cashew

If you ever wondered what the name for that moon-and-star-like icon is which you get when unlocking your panels in KDE4, it seems to be called “the Cashew”. I know there was one icon on the desktop when I started using KDE 4.2 but it somehow disappeared very soon on its own and I didn’t miss it. It seems like that has been some bug since I now had it again:

That nasty icon was sitting right on my otherwise clean desktop wallpaper. I could move it around my screen borders but it could not be removed. I thought something was broken until I finally searched for it and figured out that it’s some kind of branding not be meant to be removed. Great… Now, how do you get rid of it?!

As pointed out on the Gentoo forums (thread “KDE 4.3.0 Annoyances“) and also on a blog post, there exists a plasmoid that you can simply drop onto your desktop to remove/hide that useless cashew: I HATE the Cashew

If you should ever want that apparently useless cashew icon back, simply remove “I HATE the Cashew” by clicking the minus icon on the “Add Widgets” dialog.

There used to be an ebuild for it but since I couldn’t find it I simply wrote one on my own (well, half-way copy&pasting from other ones and the ebuild documentation, but it works). In case you need it too, here it is: (kde-misc/ihatethecashew-0.4)

# Copyright 1999-2009 Gentoo Foundation
# Distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2

MY_PN=iHateTheCashew

DESCRIPTION="I HATE the Cashew - KDE4 corner icon removal plasmoid"
HOMEPAGE="http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php?content=91009"
#SRC_URI="http://www.kde-look.org/CONTENT/content-files/91009-${MY_PN}-${PV}.tbz"
SRC_URI="http://www.kde-look.org/CONTENT/content-files/91009-${MY_PN}-4.4.tbz"

LICENSE="GPL-2"
SLOT="0"
KEYWORDS="~amd64 ~x86"
IUSE=""

S=${WORKDIR}

src_unpack() {
        unpack ${A}
}

src_compile() {
        cd iHateTheCashew
        mkdir build
        cd build
        cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr .. || die "CMake failed!"
        emake || die "Make failed!"
}

src_install() {
        cd iHateTheCashew/build
        emake DESTDIR="${D}" install || die "Install failed"
}