Hi there,

I've had a font configuration nightmare for over a week now, as I couldn't figure out why my font settings were screwed up in KDE 4.2.

No matter how I changed my font settings there would still be ugly fonts in my apps, but only if they were started from within KDE 4, not if I started them from within a different Window Manager or even just a different KDE user account.

However I keep all my font settings globally in /etc/fonts, so that was really confusing as KDE shouldn't interfere at when the anti-aliasing settings are set to "System settings".

At the end I found the guilty file: ~/.kde4/share/config/kdeglobals.

So now my question: what's the purpose of this file and why does it not reflect my KDE current font settings? It seems to me as if the information stored in kdeglobals is redundant as there are other individual files that contain similar settings.

Can someone explain that to me? I'm just curious...

Blackhole

It contains non application-specific KDE settings. I believe it stores locale settings, color schemes, and shortcuts among other things.

JontheEchinda wrote:It contains non application-specific KDE settings. I believe it stores locale settings, color schemes, and shortcuts among other things.

But why save font settings (like anti-aliasing) there while the KDE settings dialog stores them in .fonts.conf anyway? That doesn't make sense to me.

So that if a KDE application needs access to them, they are easy to retrieve and can failsafe to default values easily. It might be used by KDE to enforce the settings chosen through System Settings in a KDE session as well.

bcooksley wrote:It might be used by KDE to enforce the settings chosen through System Settings in a KDE session as well.

What exactly do you mean? When I change my System Settings how does kdeglobals in my home directory help KDE to "enforce the settings"? I don't get it. How can the settings be enforced just by saving them in yet another redundant file?
Can you give me more details on that?

That would be great. I'm very eager to understand the mechanics behind all that new Linux stuff. ^^

Oh and another question: when and how are settings written to kdeglobals? I mean I can see the failsafe purpose, but apparently kdeglobals is updated by KDE over time, but still doesn't contain my current settings. So when exactly does KDE store settings to kdeglobals? Obviously not each time I use the KDE settings dialog.

KDE will read the settings from there and either use those settings directly, or update the appropriate sub system files ( Font Config for instance )

Only core settings are stored in kdeglobals. Most configuration entries go in the large number of config files located in the same folder.

OK, that makes sense, but again when is kdeglobals updated?

In my case it clearly did not contain my KDE settings' anti-aliasing configuration which was very confusing especially if the user (that's noobish me) doesn't know about kdeglobals, but only checks his KDE settings and fonts.conf which were both fine.