A while ago I upgraded my computer at work from KDE 3.5.10 to KDE 4.3.1 - mostly because Gentoo finally decided to unmask it.

For historical reasons, I've always had the KDEHOME environment variable manually set to something specific on that machine, which is why KDE 4 ended up using the same KDEHOME directory as KDE 3. This worked surprisingly well, all the important little things were just taken over without any major problems, including mailboxes, email accounts, Konqueror bookmarks, Konqueror view profiles and the contents of kwallet. (Only my kate sessions got messed up, but they were easily recreated.)

There's one major problem though that that I just cannot get rid of:

In some places on the desktop text is shown as white text on white background (or sometimes a shade of gray on top of the same shade of gray), making it unreadable. Among the places where this happens are:
- The new K-menu
- The "Add Widgets" dialog window for the plasma desktop
- and (worst of all) some <textarea> and <select> elements in some, but not all, websites.

The last one is particularly problematic, because it interferes badly with the usage of our internal ticket system (we're using OTRS).
It happens on some websites, but not all of them, and unfortunately I couldn't find out just what the defining difference is between those sites that show the problem and those that don't. For some more examples, it does not happen on the KDE forums, but it does happen on the KDE bugtracker (the CC list is displayed white on white).

I have tried playing around with the settings under System Settings -> Appearance -> Colors, but that didn't help. I have also tried manually going through $KDEHOME/share/config and looking for the bad setting there, but didn't find anything.

Try changing from one colour scheme to another using System Settings > Appearance > Colours.
Also, you may wish to clear out KDE's caches.


Do the following outside a KDE session ( ie. at virtual terminal, with KDE not logged in )

Code: Select all

rm -rf /var/tmp/kdecache-$(id -un)/*

bcooksley wrote:Try changing from one colour scheme to another using System Settings > Appearance > Colours.
Also, you may wish to clear out KDE's caches.


Do the following outside a KDE session ( ie. at virtual terminal, with KDE not logged in )

Code: Select all

rm -rf /var/tmp/kdecache-$(id -un)/*

None of the two solutions helped. I still have white text on white background.

Try the following ( outside a KDE session once more )

Code: Select all

rm -f $(kde4-config --localprefix)/share/config/kdeglobals

Maybe you are using bitmap fonts?
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