HowTo add standard KDE system into Ubuntu 10.04 school computers

[Alvin]

On Thursday 23 September 2010 09:14:27 giovanni_re wrote:
> Recent model school computers with standard Ubuntu 10.04 installed.
> 
> Want to add on the standard KDE, so the users will be able to select the
> KDE or Gnome interface at login time.

That is possible by default. You can select the DE from GDM or KDM.
 
> Important: For minimizing system administation efforts:
> - Want to ensure adding KDE doesn't break the standard Ubuntu system
> operation in any way.
> 
> 1) What is the proper way to add in KDE?

# aptitude install kubuntu-desktop

> 2) What problems might likely occur, & what are the methods to fix them?

By installing kubuntu-desktop, you will set KDM as the default login manager. 
You can change that if you want, but in my opinion it's a better choice. (KDM 
supports XDMCP.) KDM does have the occasional problem of not showing up [1], 
forcing you to reboot. This is most probably an upstart/plymouth problem.

There are no show-stopping problems as far as I know. You'll encounter some 
bugs, but nothing life-threatening, like nepomuk segfaulting [2]. You can 
prevent network-manager problems by disabling suspend/hibernate [3].
Other likely problems are kontact, akregator, kopete and krunner segfaulting, 
but your students probably don't need those. Also, the NFS kioslave is broken 
[4], but Gnome doesn't even have such a feature [5], so just mount your shares 
in /etc/fstab and hope that mountall succeeds in mounting them. If your /home 
directories reside on a fileserver, be sure to read [6].

It all depends on your needs. If you tell us what the students will be doing 
with KDE, we might tell you more about what they might encounter. I deployed 
Kubuntu in a company where it is mainly running one commercial application, 
XDMCP and rdesktop. Aside from the many boot troubles (reboot as workaround, 
not KDE related), and the Caps Lock button not working in rdesktop [7] there 
are not many complaints.

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/538524
[2] https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/590088
[3] https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/524454
[4] https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/385514
[5] https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/24430
[6] http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/PIM/Akonadi#Deployment_issues
[7] https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/251709
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