May 132011
 

All my systems have been upgraded to Squeeze for a couple of months now. Initial impression was that there are lots of nice new toys and the GNU tools and base Debian system feel even more solid than ever. However KDE is more flakey and slower than I have seen a GNU/Linux desktop in a while. There are also missing features in some KDE programs that were yet to be ported (to plasma I presume) at the time that Debian froze the KDE version.

Turns out the slowness can be much improved with a few tweaks. Mainly disabling that complete failure (or virus) Nepomuk. After this the entire KDE desktop feels much smoother and more responsive and doesn’t get buried into swap with run away indexing.

In System Settings/Advanced tab/Desktop search:
– Disable checkbox for “Nepomuk Semantic Desktop”
– Disable checkbox for “Strigi Desktop File Indexer”

In System Settings/Advanced tab/Service Manager:
– Disable any services you don’t need e.g: Power Devil if not using a laptop.
– Yes Nepomuk is in here too, disable it, although that does not seem to change anything.
– Take some time to consider which services you will really use every day.

~/.kde/Autostart/killnepomuk.sh

#!/bin/sh
#Kill the nepomuk virus.
pkill nepomukserver &

Remove and exclude from all backups (this cache can get to 650MB!):

rm -R .kde/share/apps/nepomuk/repository

Other things that I previously didn’t need to exclude from backups:

exclude = /home/*/.kde/share/apps/nepomuk/repository
exclude = /home/*/.mozilla/eclipse
exclude = /home/*/.mozilla/firefox

Uninstall and disable akonadi from starting mysql, .config/akonadi/akonadiserverrc:

StartServer=false

Note that this may cause you some issues if you use kde pim apps, I don’t.

Conclusion

I really love the KDE Alt+F2 command line runner, I know the concept is not completely new but this is the first time that I really find it working for me. The menu is flashy but takes too long, use Alt+F2.

Dolphin is not powerful enough for me and I am back to using Konqueror. I did give Dolphin a fair go but I multi-split panes and right click to get svn context menu’s…all day long.

Webkit in Konqueror is still not for browsing, still using Iceweasel/Firefox and all it’s toys.

Kate, luv ya, finally *smart* auto brackets and code snippets/templates.

I’m finding the 3D window switching and screen edge actions so productive that I have done away with the task bar, nice! Again not brand new concepts but really working for me for the first time.

Kdesvn mostly better, sadly I’ll be leaving you for Git soon.

USB mount/umount WAY better, thanks to the Angel that fixed this.

Comment with your tweaks if you’ve got em!

Gavin Kromhout:


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  One Response to “Tweaking Debian Squeeze”

  1. If khotkeys set via edit menu does not work for you then try this:

    – System Settings -> Advanced -> Service Manager -> KHotKeys (service must be running)
    – System Settings -> General -> Input Actions -> KMenuEdit (KMenuEdit Global Shortcuts must be checked)

    Credits:
    http://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=66&t=89401

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