$KDEHOME not set: causes problems choosing mouse cursors

[Tony Green]

Binary package hint: kdebase

(Choosing kdebase as I'm not sure where this should actually be but it seems possible)
AMD-64 - Kubuntu 8.10

When I installed Kubuntu 8.04, I did a clean install so that no old configuration files existed outside my home directory.

I noticed at the time that whatever mouse cursor theme I selected, it always reverted back to Oxygen White, but didn't get round to raising a bug for this at the time.

I upgraded to 8.10 and subsequently installed KDE4.2 when it became available this week. As I have found a number of problems with KDE4.2, I've been raising several bugs directly with the KDE Bugzilla and reported this one.

After a significant amount of investigation work (documented at http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=182986) we have worked out that the problem is being caused by Kubuntu placing some files in ~/.kde4 while most of its files are in ~/.kde (where they're supposed to be according to all the release notes).

Specifically, ~/.kde4/share/config/kcminputrc is WRITTEN by systemsettings when the cursor theme is changed, but when KDE starts up, it READS ~/.kde4/share/config/kcminputrc instead.

The reason for this is that $KDEHOME is not being set anywhere - presumably KDE is making its best guess or something is hard coded within the various programs.

I have shown that this can be fixed by adding the following lines into /etc/profile:

KDEHOME=~/.kde
export KDEHOME

though this may not be the best place for it.

It would seem that this is something that would need to be included in a future release.

[Harald Sitter (apachelogger)]

Not using .kde4 anymore.