I've installed new kde software pack for my windows xp, and i love it.


But i was wondering, does any one have a solution for making my hum drum windows xp look like KDE? possibly for free. (Aka not using programs such as windowblinds and what not.)


I thought for a bit there that kde package might have included a kde gui package too.

For some weeks now the plasma workspace now runs on windows too. Tested it in a VM and it "basically works". But I have no idea how to get rid of the windows taskbar (not only setting it to auto-hide).
The Oxygen icon set is available at kde-looks.org: http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.ph ... tent=74184
I assume you have to convert the icons to some windows format or so. Never tried it, but should be not too difficult.
When it comes to window decoration and theming I have absolutly now idea, you should check the windows xp theme pages for that. AFAIK the kde on windows team is not working on something like that ATM.

Plasma work space.... Hmmm i'll check that out...

Patrick Spendrin has blogged about Plasma on Windows some time ago. So at least some basics are working. I've also seen some work on making Plasma compile on Windows lately, but this work often doesn't go without just disabling parts of the code that are X11-specific -- you can't reasonably expect that to work then

I'm not sure how viable it is at this point to expect anything useful from Plasma on Windows at this point. Plasma is built in large parts with X11 in mind.

There are a couple of other options, btw. You could run Plasma in a virtual machine, for example.

dtritscher wrote:For some weeks now the plasma workspace now runs on windows too. Tested it in a VM and it "basically works". But I have no idea how to get rid of the windows taskbar (not only setting it to auto-hide).
The Oxygen icon set is available at kde-looks.org: http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.ph ... tent=74184
I assume you have to convert the icons to some windows format or so. Never tried it, but should be not too difficult.
When it comes to window decoration and theming I have absolutly now idea, you should check the windows xp theme pages for that. AFAIK the kde on windows team is not working on something like that ATM.

The Windows taskbar and start menu and stuff are all part of Window's graphical shell. To kill it, open up the task manager (++) and end the process called 'explorer.exe'.

You can also use the task manager to start explorer.exe back up, in case you lose your sanity. ;)

actually there aren't a lot of x11 specific things in plasma, just composite and a couple of other things, anyway plasma worked well till 1 month ago, now we have a little glitch that displays two plasma desktop, but the precompiled package in the installer should work well, if you use plasma panels and plasma crashes the space used by the panels will remain used and you can't move windows on it, but you can solve this by killing and restarting explorer.exe
if you want to quit plasma type kquitapp plasma
for the oxygen style there was some work done by kraplax to port it to msstyle but I don't think it's finished yet, you can anyway use oxygen on kde4 apps by doing this http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/KDE_on ... or_widgets
for the icons you have to convert them to .ico using some app, we also have a png2ico command line utility inside kdewin32
I've also ported the oxygen cursors theme to windows using png2ico and I hope to put them in the installer asap

jrick wrote:The Windows taskbar and start menu and stuff are all part of Window's graphical shell. To kill it, open up the task manager (++) and end the process called 'explorer.exe'.

You can also use the task manager to start explorer.exe back up, in case you lose your sanity.

I don't know if killing explorer.exe is a nifty way ...

Why not auto-hide taskbar. You can also put it to left, right or top position. Then you don't have to care about auto-show if you use your mouse at bottom area.

About that msstyle i was working on. I stil have the source images and the decompiled msstyle, though the style itself needs to be reworked from scratch, i guess. Too many glitches. And to be honest i'm not sure it'll be as good looking as Linux's kwin or widgetstyles. Even if i could provide you with a bearable windows decoration the widget style is really tough thing - everything works differently so even if most things are just not reproducable (e.g. nice tab backgrounds or Oxygen buttons on dark bg when used in webpages).
Porting Oxygen to Vista msstyle is even harder.
* Kraplax wonders if making some kind of svn for msstyle source files and config files would be sane. That way people could incorporate in building the whole theme together...

Killing explorer.exe isn't really a good idea, in my experience. I tried killing explorer.exe a few weeks ago and Plasma entirely disappeared from the screen. When I brought explorer back plasma had it's own blank entry in the taskmanager and sorta acted like a window....

Anyway, it'll be exciting when KDE can become a suitable shell replacement for Explorer. That'll make Windows suck so much less. (tm)

JontheEchinda wrote:I tried killing explorer.exe a few weeks ago and Plasma entirely disappeared from the screen. When I brought explorer back plasma had it's own blank entry in the taskmanager and sorta acted like a window....

Hm.. I'm running KDE4.1.2 now and just tried to do following:
1) launched Plasma and added a panel on the top. The panel is barely configurable since it has broken alignment.
2) Killed explorer.exe. Now, the Plasma desktop just disappeared with explorer's one, though that Plasma panel remained. Played with it a bit - no means to get the Plasma desktop back, though the alignment bug disappeared! Though, now Panel can't be dragged to another side of screen. Resized - yes. Dragged - no.
3) Launch the explorer. Pretty much weird - still no Plasma Desktop, though that panel is still here and can be overlayed by windows! :P

Though, i didn't notice any "acted like a window" things. Last time i've seen that was with the first Plasma on Windows appearance: each panel of Plasma desktp was shown in the taskbar as a separate window and could be even minimized XD

Though, now the main showstoppers for me from using Plasma on a day-to-day basis on windows is KDE's inability to deal with registered filetypes of Windows - you can't launch exe files or anything like that. And missing "My computer" implementation in FMs is really annoying when it comes to navigation - you chose the "ROOT" location, but it brings you to file:///C:/

Eh, maybe I didn't explain myself well enough. I had pretty much what you experienced, hehe.

lol
Pressing the "Show dashboard" widget on that "zombie" panel actually shows that hidden Plasma Desktop. Given that Dashboard overlays all windows and hides panels (or at least that one :P) it looks as if i switched to cempletely another universe, instead of just showing my plasma applets :P

Maybe.... maybe you actually did! ZOMG! :-O

"KDE finds portal into alternate universe, Aaron Seigo blames lack of Qt 4.5. Stay tuned for the whole story at 11."

It is possible to change the default Windows XP shell, see http://www.trap17.com/forums/how-change ... 20367.html Not sure if plasma.exe is feature-complete enough for the job, but this may be interesting in the future

vdboor wrote:It is possible to change the default Windows XP shell, see http://www.trap17.com/forums/how-change ... 20367.html Not sure if plasma.exe is feature-complete enough for the job, but this may be interesting in the future

Yeah, that's why I was thinking that killing explorer.exe would work, but (as I've never used Plasma on Windows), I didn't know that it would make Plasma disappear with it.

Making Plasma an actual Windows shell would probably be a lot of work... Just look at Cairo. They've been writing an explorer.exe replacement for a while now, and it's only now in private alpha.

Not to mention that this would bring up the argument that "KDE code should be completely cross platform, to prevent a 'Windows fork' of it". Just look at some of the comments when it was announced that Amarok 2 would run natively on Windows.