
Assuming you are using a dedicated user to build KDE Plasma™, and you already have an installed Plasma™ version, running your new Plasma™ may be a bit tricky, as the new Plasma™ has to take precedence over the old. You must change the environment variables of your login scripts to make sure the newly-built desktop is used.
Starting from version 1.16, kdesrc-build will try to install an
appropriate login driver, that will allow you to login to your
kdesrc-build-built KDE desktop from your login manager. This can be
disabled by using the install-session-driver
configuration file option.
Note
Session setup does not occur while kdesrc-build is running in pretend mode.
This driver works by setting up a custom “xsession
”
session type. This type of session should work by default with the sddm login
manager (where it appears as a “Custom” session), but other login
managers (such as LightDM and
gdm) may require additional files installed to
enable xsession
support.
The default login managers for some distributions may require additional
packages to be installed in order to support xsession
logins.
The Fedora Linux® distribution requires the
xorg-x11-xinit-session
package to be installed for customxsession
login support.Debian and Debian-derived Linux® distributions should support custom
xsession
logins, but require the
option to be set inallow-user-xsession
/etc/X11/Xsession.options
. See also the Debian documentation on customizing the X session.For other distributions, go to the section called “Manually adding support for xsession”.
If there were no distribution-specific directions for your distribution in the section called “Adding xsession support for distributions”, you can manually add a “Custom xsession login” entry to your distribution's list of session types as follows:
Procedure 2.1. Adding an .xsession login session type.
Note
This procedure will likely require administrative privileges to complete.
Create the file
/usr/share/xsessions/kdesrc-build.desktop
.Ensure the file just created has the following text:
The
$HOME
entry must be replaced by the full path to your home directory (example,/home/
). The desktop entry specification does not allow for user-generic files.user
When the login manager is restarted, it should show a new session type, “KDE Plasma Desktop (unstable; kdesrc-build)” in its list of sessions, which should try to run the
.xsession
file installed by kdesrc-build if it is selected when you login.Note
It may be easiest to restart the computer to restart the login manager, if the login manager does not track updates to the
/usr/share/xsessions
directory.
This documentation used to include instruction on which environment variables to set in order to load up the newly-built desktop. These instructions have been moved to an appendix (the section called “Setting up a KDE login profile”).
If you intend to setup your own login support you can consult that
appendix or view the sample-kde-env-master.sh
file
included with the kdesrc-build source.