Setting up a minimal KDE

[Manish Jain]

Hi,

On my tertiary box, I was facing multiple problems with FreeBSD 11 
Release. Rather than fix each one, I decided to try a new, daring 
approach - a minimal KDE atop FreeBSD 12.0-CURRENT r316508.

Comments, suggestions, tips and experimentation requests are open to 
this venture.

I installed FreeBSD CURRENT and then installed kde via 'pkg install 
kde'. After kde installation was over, I realized that I was running 
against my original aspiration of a minimal KDE. So I did the following 
to remove KDE :

pkg delete -R kde
pkg autoremove

Then I installed lightweight KDE using :

pkg install kde-baseapps kde-workspace kde-runtime

The above setup has the following components built-in : konsole, kate, 
kdm. It was missing okular, k3b and kolourpaint, but these easily be 
installed via pkg.

I now have a fully functional KDE and a box that, despite being CURRENT, 
works well. There are glitches, however. If anyone has tips to help 
resolve the glitches, it shall lead to the perfect KDE setup :

1) This is the more serious glitch. Taskbar icons in the KDE panel, for 
some reason I cannot guess why, are rendered horribly. Fonts everywhere 
else are pretty much the same as before, but iconified taskbar fonts in 
the panel are very, very ugly.

2) Because my network interface is statically configured, I want to turn 
off dhclient entirely, so that it does not work on each reboot 
automatically. DHCPDISCOVER packets cost me about a minute on system 
start-up. I have tried putting the following in /etc/rc.conf, but this 
does not seem to have any effect : 'dhcpd_enabled=NO"'.

3) I can't figure out how to remove nepomuk-core. 'pkg delete 
nepomuk-core' says it would also lead to removal of kde-baseapps, which 
would obviously be a very bad idea.

Thanks for any help. If anyone has experimentation requests with FreeBSD 
CURRENT and/or KDE, please feel free to ping me.

Regards
Manish Jain