I am new to this forum and don't know where to ask this question. Please move this thread if its in the wrong place. My question is:

I wanted to try a vanilla kde desktop on my ubuntu karmic system. So I installed kdebase package from synaptic. But even now, kde option is not present in gdm login screen. I don't want to install kubuntu-desktop as I've tried kubuntu and it is very unstable on my system. All I want is the solid base of ubuntu and its software selection and a plain kde installation. Please help me and also tell me if there is any other way to install vanilla kde.

Please help me folks.

you need a .desktop file in /usr/share/xsessions/ to have a valid entry for any login manager. The needed file kde.desktop is provided by package kde-workspace-data, make sure you have that installed.

See https://help.ubuntu.com/community/InstallingKDE