This post is a follow up of sorts to my previous post.

A few days ago, I did a fresh install of the latest snapshot of Debian Jessie/testing.

Install went fine. One thing that needs correction, imho, is that choosing English as installation language - which also makes it the system language - forces one to choose locale that is also English speaking. Odd. I do not recall if that is the common thing in other distros' installers. Luckily one can choose whatever keymap one wants. I obviously use Swedish keyboard, Swedish locale (time zone and formats, numerals etc), but I almost always have English language system. If for nothing else, that makes it much easier to troubleshoot with the help of the web. 🙂

I did a network-install, updated it, then proceeded to put a DE on it. As usual, I went for a KDE minimal install:

apt-get install kde-workspace

This is a very basic install, e.g. no GUI text editor, not even a file manager. Oddly enough, VLC was one of the very few installed GUI applications. I guess it is because VLC provides the default sound backend. GStreamer is not installed. It is still quite a big bunch of software, going from only the base net install, 300+ MB download, that takes up almost another 1GB of space. Now, that is X server included, and it looks like a lot of not necessary libraries, e.g. both (free) nvidia and radeon stuff. I probably should have installed nouveau first?

Here is how the desktop looked right after install. KDE 4.10.

I then installed Dolphin, Kate, Konsole and other software to my liking. I prefer to install like this, as I can then choose what to have on my computer. Debian has a set of metapackages for KDE. Funnily enough, the kde-workspace I used is not mentioned there. Maybe I am doing something wrong? 🙂

Furthermore, here one can see the state of KDE in the different Debian versions.

Two days later ...

Some things were a bit quirky, and I could not figure out why. I did put it on a clean drive, and copied over all my old config files etc from the old (Wheezy) install. Maybe that was part of the problem? I honestly have no idea.

Anyways, I did another Jessie/testing install two days ago. It works very fine now. What I did differently from the above one was:

1. I installed it on my old Wheezy drive. Just a clean install of the "/" partition, without touching the "/home" partition. No copying, everything was already there.

2. After the net-install of the basic system, I installed nouveau.

3. I then installed KDE. This time I chose the most basic meta-package recommended: kde-plasma-desktop.

Of these points, no. 2 was irrelevant to my problems, but I think it is not necessary to pull in e.g. radeon stuff when I am using nvidia card.

The only thing I removed from my KDE install was kwrite, which I replaced with Kate. I probably use less than 5% of its features, but it is very nice, and fast.

So now I am pretty happy duffer, at least when it comes to my desktop machine. Stay tuned, I will probably screw things up again 😉

Maybe in a future post I will list a few of the applications I use, some KDE, some Qt, some GTK, some CLI. The good thing with net install and then adding a base KDE system is the power of choice.