SUSE feel on mandriva (installing kickoff-qt on mandriva)

From the title of this post, it is clear enough that this is somewhat related to migrating from one OS, SUSE in this case, to another. I did switch from my suse to mandriva with no particular reason.

One of the main things that made a difference was the kde’s menu. the default kicker menu on mandriva didn’t have that search box which would direct you to where the shortcut is directed, and I felt that it was something that I should have. So I decided to install kickoff, a replacement for the default kicker which was originally for suse. I used this before, and I was comfortable with.

The first thing you need to get this up in running on mandriva is you need to install kickoff-qt. But in order to do this you will need to install liblazy. The fastest and the most comfortable way of doing this is to install using urpm. I advice adding urpm sources to your installation source list first, so you wont have a problem on where you could download the stuffs. To do this, go to http://easyurpmi.zarb.org/, and just follow the directions on the site. Of course, pic mandriva as your distro. After installing these installation sources, you can now install liblazy and kickoff-qt using rpmdrake. Note: I happen to install kickoff-mandriva-0.1.655773-4mud2007.1 , and liblazy-0.1-1mud2007.1.

After installing the two packages, it will be best to test if kickoff qt is running. to do this, you need to kill your kicker process. You can do this by simply checking on the process manager, or typing “ps -aux | grep -i kicker” on your CLI, and kill the process using “kill <process number>” now that you’ve killed kicker, you can now start running kickoff but using this command “/opt/kickoff-mandriva/bin/kicker“. By now, you should have kickoff up and running. When you need to revert back, just do “dcop kicker kicker restart“.

Now, all these will surely run your kickoff menu, but this will not run it automatically on boot. To enable this you will need to edit this file “/usr/share/autostart/panel.desktop“. Look for the line that has Exec=kicker, and replace it with the absolute path of your kickoff binary. It will look like this “Exec=/opt/kickoff-mandriva/bin/kicker“. After doing this, reboot, and you’ll have kickoff-qt running.

May I also point out that this one works only on kde. (well that is what I know about it).