We're using home directories shared via cifs from a Windows server and trying to use KDE4.6 as the desktop. Upon initialization we receive the error "Call to lnusertemp failed (temporary directories full). Check your installation".

I've narrowed down the problem to KDE sttempting to create symbolic links in /home/$USER/.kde/ which point to actual directories in /tmp/.

During testing when I use a local home directory there is no problem and KDE starts just fine.

Is it possible to use KDE with cifs home directories?

Thanks
Kyle

It is probably because CIFS does not support symbolic links. Not sure if you can otherwise workaround the issue, although you could set the KDEHOME environment variable to be outside of the home directory, with the share/ directory in it symlinked itself to be in their home directory.

I'm having the exact same issue in openSUSE 12.3.
How can this be resolved ?

The only solution in this instance is to set KDEHOME to another location very early in the login process, where symlinks are supported. Note that KDE also depends upon sockets - which CIFS does not support either.

KDEHOME should be set extremely early in the startup process - before the execution of startkde in this case.

Alternately, you could switch from CIFS home directories to NFS home directories (as NFS supports both sockets and symlinks).

I wish that was true, I actually mounted a NFS share (just with dolphin though) and tried to create a symbolic link and it would not let me.
So at least I knows that a Windows 2008 R2 NFS share does not support Symbolic Links.

As a general rule, both the protocol itself as well as the underlying file system on the server side must support the functionality in question.
To the best of my knowledge, symlinks are generally something used only on UNIX based systems, so it is unlikely to be supported by the NFS mechanism supported by Windows server.

The only workaround I can recommend is setting KDEHOME to somewhere else, unless you can use a native system to host the home directories.