I tried searching the forum for this but didn't have much luck.

I'm migrating all my machines to KDE 4.6 now as part of Kubuntu 11.04. I have a bunch of them: about 5 desktops and 3 laptops/netbooks. I'd like to synchronize all my KDE settings across all the machines.

That is, things like my desktop plasmoid configuration, the keyboard settings, the fact that I want to use Konq as my file browser instead of Dolphin, the KWin settings for wobbliness, disabling the "nepomuk/strigi" things, and so on. It takes a long time to configure all this stuff just the way I like it, and if I make a change, I don't want to have to do it manually to a bunch of places.

I thought it seemed scary to just rsync the .kde directory to all these machines - i might mess something up. What is the "official" way to do this?

BTW I think KDE4 is about the only remaining sane desktop left in the world. Unity went off the deep end, as did gnome, Windows is... Windows, and the lightweight choices like XFCE never provide all of what I want. KDE has been nicely configurable. Looks nice, works well even on slightly older HW. It's great - not perfect, but what is? I wish more distros would adopt it by default!

You shouldn't mess anything up. Mind, depending on your hardware some desktop effects might work/not work.

Also bear in mind that the amarok database or kontact settings get copied if you do this but not your address book (or any other akonadi stuff for that matter).

Other stuff like kbasket, tellico et al will also get copied over.

Bottom line: If in doubt give more info

You shouldn't mess anything up

Thanks... but are you *sure*? Coz every time I've ever tried that with past KDE's, it's broken a ton of things

Problem is things like hostnames embedded in application configurations, or various forms of GUIDS. For example it seemed like Digikam had some kind of GUID stored in there and it gets very confused if you just rsync ~/.kde over from another machine.

Okay, you are exposing my ignorance - what on earth is a guid? Isn't that some M$-thing?

I'd be interested in _what_ you broke in the past.

You could also try just copying over ~/.kde/share/config/plasma* to copy over your basic KDE settings (obviously you have to make sure that all extra plasmoids are installed for it to work).

Well I probably should have said UUID, but it's about the same thing. Stands for Universally Unique ID (or Globally Unique ID). Windows uses them but so does Linux. For example, you can see the UUIDs for your disks by doing this:

$ ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid/

But they're used also by some other programs to do things like track their databases and so on. It's why, for example, they don't recommend that you copy some kinds of VM disk images over to other systems with a simple "cp" - it creates a duplicate uuid and confuses the VM program.

Ah, thanks. You'll find that the command blkid does the same trick and is easier to type...

Whatever, if you only want the settings transferred see the last para of my previous post

Certainly do make sure that you aren't logged into KDE on either side when running rsync.