I'm trying to change my icon theme and it's taking forever. I'm running KDE 4.5 on Kubuntu 10.04 and I tried to switch to the MIB Ossigeno icon theme V3 Classics 3.2 that I got from the Get New Themes dialog and when it seemed to freeze after running for over an hour I shut it down.

I decided to switch back to the Oxygen icon them but now it's been updating for over two hours with no end in sight. The Updating system Configuration progress window has run several times, with each new time taking longer and longer to run. (it's gone from 20-30% done in the ten minutes it's taken me to write this.)

Is this normal? How long should it take to change an icon theme in KDE 4.5? I will gladly post any of my config info needed, just let me know what info is germane so I don't post unnecessary info.

No, it can't be normal. I changed mine from Oxygen to Crystal in seconds, and then back also in seconds. Icon files can be 30mb+ in size so if you have slow connection it would take a while to dl but once dl'ed it should be fast.

If you create another user does that user experience the same problem?

That still strikes me as odd. I'm not trying to download an icon theme (at least I don't think so), I'm now trying to enable the default icon theme on my system.

The progress bar finally finished from that last cycle maybe ten minutes ago, and the new one is 5% complete. I have to say I'm not at all happy with this aspect of KDE, which stinks because the rest of it works so nicely.

I usually shut down my system at day's end (about 15 minutes from now) but I'll let it rock overnight. With any luck I won't see my computer still trying to chew on the task when I get back to my comp at about 7am tomorrow.

Definitely not normal. I'm using that icon theme myself (and looks great!), and it took me 20 seconds at most to apply it (not counting the download time).

Unfortunately, I'm not familiar with how the application of icon themes work internally to be able to tell why it takes so long for you.

The only suggestion I have at this point is to download the theme manually from kde-look.org rather than through "Get New Themes" to see if that makes a difference.

It may be a case of a corrupt cache, and if so you can try removing the /var/tmp/kdecache-username/kpc directory (preferably from outside KDE).

I'll try flushing the cache tomorrow morning. Hopefully by then the default theme will finally be done getting re-enabled.

That is if the application of the cache is even what the hell is taking so bloody long.

I just have 1 window that opens and says "updating system configuration" when I change the icons - you have something amiss, letting it "chew" overnight won't fix it (I would think).

try these:

1) restart kde, are your icons correct?
or
2) in file $KDEDIR/share/config/kdeglobals what is:
[Icons]
theme=?????
If you change "?????" to oxygen, save the file and restart KDE do you have your icons corrrect?

You may need to run "kbuildsycoca4 --noincremental" prior to the update taking place. You can safely press cancel to this dialog also, simply run the above command afterwards in Konsole.

@google01103:
That's what the file shows as my icon theme already. I suspect it's trying to update more settings than just the icon theme, so now I just need to try to find out what all's being updated. I'll probably run System Settings from the CLI later to try to see exactly is happening that takes so bloody long.

@bcooksley:
I'll run that command first and see what happens. Thanks for the info. I guess I really need to take all this info I'm gathering and get back to running my GNOME user's guide to KDE (if it doesn't turn out that someone's already written it).