Installing KDE on MNT

One useful trick I’ve learned about the Debian package manager is that if you create the file:

/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d

with contents that are simply “exit 101” (no #!/bin/sh, no nothing, just “exit 101”) then on installing new services, they will be installed, but will not be set to run by default. This is useful if you’d like to have some variety of services available - different windowing systems, etc - but not be actively running them until you invoke them manually.

Once you’ve created that file, you can install the “kde-standard” package in the usual way, via Apt. It might take a while to download, it did for me.

Once you’ve done that, from your home directory, cd into .local/bin and copy “reform-windowmaker” to “kde”:

cp reform-windowmaker kde

and then open that “kde” file up in the editor of your choice.

Comment out the “export GDK_BACKEND” line, and replace the last line that currently reads “exec wmaker” with:

exec startplasma-x11

… save the file and make it executable with:

chmod +x ./kde

If you’re inclined, you can update /etc/reform-help to add “kde” to the list of window managers next to “start a graphical environment” just for completion’s sake. But with this, you should be able to start up your Reform, log in to a terminal, and start kde from the command line. I haven’t done much with it yet, but from an hour or two of playing around with it, it seems to work fine.

You can bail out of it whenever you like with “alt-escape”.

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