I recently installed Qubes OS on an old laptop, and though most things went well, for some reason the selection of available widgets for KDE is quite different. The activity switcher and quicklauncer I have on my desktop system are now gone.
(I’ve been using folder view as a (not so good) substitute for qucklauncher, but half of my folder views insist on expanding every time I restart the machine…the other half don’t, and I can’t figure out why some do this and some behave.)
Simply trying to follow the instructions (within KDE) results in it not being able to find the widgets (unsurprising since it’s dom0 trying to connect to the internet). So how, given I’m trying to add widgets to dom0’s copy of KDE, do I do this?
In addition to the instructions found within these community pages to install kde, i also install a whole bunch of other packages using qubes-dom0-update that i find useful (assuming you installed kde with ‘qubes-dom0-update kde-settings-qubes’.
I have the widgets you are missing, but I don’t know exactly which packages provided those specific widgets. However, I can tell you the names of all of the packages I install that do include widgets:
Well, a few of these were installed already all of the others were unfindable by qubes-dom0-update (kf5-widgetsaddons, plasma-widget-menubar kf5-kconfigwidget kf5-coreaddons kf5-textwidgets kf5-kwidgetaddons kf5-jobwidgets kf5-kguiaddons kf5-kdedeclarative).
I may well have typoed something (though I did try to proofreed) as there’s no clipboard into dom0.
I should probably have mentioned that i have all the testing repos enabled in dom0, although i do not know if that would be the difference.
If you do not want to enable those then could i ask which method you followed to install kde? If you point me to the page/s you used I might be able to find out why they aren’t available to you. I’m currently on 4.2, but i have used the same list for 4.2 as i did in 4.1.
I am unclear what you mean by “quicklauncher”.
If you mean the widget called up by Alt+F2, that is krunner, and comes
as part of the plasma-workspace package.
I don’t really understand how some packages are not available on one attempt and are on another, but I have had the same experience. So I wonder if they become available after other packages they rely on are installed - if that is the case then here are some of the bigger packages I install before the ones i listed
There are others, but those are the only ones i can think that might affect (if indeed any of them do, as I really don’t know) other than the idea i’ve mentioned, I can not think of why i have been able to install the extra widgets if you haven’t.
When you add a widget through the popup menu, and the scrolling window on the left with widgets in it comes up, it’s called Quicklaunch. As near as I can tell, krunner is something different. (Edit: From experimenting, apparently krunner is the little search bar that pops up sometimes when I least expect it. I suspect we’d each find the other’s KDE setup extremely frustrating.)
Quicklaunch sets up a small white window on the desktop (you can resize it and put a meaningful title on it); the window contains icons (actually it contains desktop files, represented by icons visually). Anything in that window can just be single-clicked to launch that app.
On my desktop system I tend to put one VM in each quicklaunch window, with (at a minimum) start qube, terminal and filemanager in it, then also an app (or several) that is characteristic of that VM (e.g., for my LibreOffice virtual machine, I put LibreWrite, LibreCalc and LibreImpress icons. That one quicklauncher has seven icons in it.
On my laptop where quicklauncher is missing, I’ve been using folder view as a substitute. However the icons there end up being links to desktop files that are in a folder on dom0. If I don’t want it to be a link, I have to actually copy the desktop file into the folder (maintenance hazard if the original desktop file changes)…then I have to run it once to tell the system I trust it. After all that…it’s a double click to launch AND the damned widget as often as not resizes itself larger when I restart the computer, shoving other widgets around on my desktop to accomodate this. (Some always do that, others never do; I have no idea why, I just know I can watch it happen when I switch to that activity for the first time after a restart.) That makes it impossible to lay them out efficiently.
As of today the following return “no match for argument” kf5_widgetsaddons, kf5_coreaddons, kf5-textwidgets, kf5-kwidgetaddons kf5-jobwidgets kf5-guiaddons.
As for why it differed on two different days, perhaps it has something to do with the very flaky connection I was on the first time (literally the connection is either there and reasonably good, or it behaves like someone pulled the plug on it–ZERO throughput–at any given time of day, totally at random).
Must be some sort of email thing…I had replied a second time (because now I know not to edit) saying a reinstall had done it (it took a little bit of bash reading to figure out how to get that script to do a reinstall). Apparently you never saw that.
Thanks again! Trying to use folder view was driving me nuts.
I’m glad you fixed it with that first one in that list, I apologize for my error, when copying them from my install script i missed out the ‘k’ from several of those packages, they should be -