Hi, I was wondering if it's possible to share a single KDE configuration across multiple computers for a single user.

I was wondering if i could just connect to a server using sshfs and store .kde/share/config there. Now that i think about it, you'd need a local copy of the config in case the network was not accessible. And if you make changes offline you'd have to push them back to your originator when you went back online.

I kompared the configs on two machines and it looks possible to do this, although k3brc on one machine said device_search_path=/dev/sr0 and on the other said /dev/hdc. Also i suppose they have monitors which run at different sizes.

Would all of .kde/share/ be shared?

I read Akonadi might be able to do this. Can anyone shed any light on that? It seems limited to PIM, so will that work with Akregator and Konqueror?

thanks,
Brian

It is indeed possible to share the KDE configuration across several machines ( RSync would probably work best I think ) although Akonadi cannot do this.

In general, your idea works. I've done it before just to test, and it worked fine with a few gotcha's to think about (I had /home mounted over the network so I didn't have to bother with rsync or something similar though).

The two gotchas I ran into were:

1. Preferably use the same version of KDE and the apps, not to mention where KDE stores its settings. Some distros, such as Kubuntu, stores KDE4 settings in ~/.kde. Others, such as openSuSE, stores them in ~./kde4. It wouldn't be much use to have such a scheme in place if you get different settings depending on the computer (if they're using different distros or if the config-path has been changed) used to login.
2. Secondly, if composite is enabled: be conservative about what effects to turn on in KWin if the different computers have different graphic cards. The monitor and the resolutions it can handle shouldn't matter as much. It may, but I didn't run into any problems there. X and KDE switched the display as necessary.

I don't think you need to be concerned about k3b though. It seems to rewrite the configuration of what devices are available on launch. It did for me anyway, although that was admittedly the KDE3 version of K3B. The KDE4 version is not stable enough for me yet so I can't vouch for that one.

Note too that you should probably (I haven't as of yet since I just tried it out) limit the user(s) in question to be logged into only one KDE-session at once regardless of machine. I hope I'm wrong, but I can't help but wonder what would happen if two different computers were simultaneously trying to update the, for example, phonondevicesrc file.