Thanks. Installing the package 'plasma-desktop' got my karmic install half-way working.
The crash reports were then pointing to the ruby interpreter. Rather than hunting down the particular plasmoid/ruby script that was causing the crash I reset my desktop configuration by removing $HOME/.kde/share/config/plasma-desktop-appletsrc
Thanks. Installing the package 'plasma-desktop' got my karmic install half-way working.
The crash reports were then pointing to the ruby interpreter. Rather than hunting down the particular plasmoid/ruby script that was causing the crash I reset my desktop configuration by removing $HOME/. kde/share/ config/ plasma- desktop- appletsrc