KDE 4.5 on openSUSE

I run openSUSE as my primary operating system – have done so since I worked at the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, which was a Novell shop. Right around Thanksgiving, I somehow ended up backed into the corner of needing to upgrade to KDE 4.5. I don't actually remember the order everything played out, but there was some poor video and resource performance, a game I couldn't get working for the nieces and nephews (okay, and for me on the plane), and knetworkmanager broke -- and my end solution was to plow all those problems under with a big upgrade and start fresh with whatever new issues cropped up.

Thankfully, the process of upgrading KDE to 4.5 is fairly pain-free in openSUSE, as long as you read the fine print. And the fine print is: The knetworkmanager applet won't work under KDE 4.5, so you'll need to switch to the knetworkmanager plasmoid; except, once you've broken the knetworkmanager applet, it's too late to switch conveniently -- you've lost all connectivity. Also, the plasmoid has it's own issues.

• So, STEP 1 – you'll want to follow these instructions to make the upgrade, bearing in mind that instruction #5 really needs to happen before #4.


• And, STEP 2 – to get wireless networking working in the plasmoid, you'll want to add the command:

  qdbus org.kde.kded /kded loadModule networkmanagement

  to your Autostart folder, as described in this post. I just dropped it into an executable text file called knm.sh, and that seems to have done the trick.

Forewarned is forearmed. Godspeed!

UPDATE -- I actually used YaST Software Management, rather than zypper as in the first link, but the outcome should be the same.

UPDATE 2 == At some point, I also deleted everything in these directories, because someone on the internet told me to, so if you're still having trouble, give that a go:
/var/tmp/kdecache-$USER
/tmp/kde-$USER
/tmp/ksocket-$USER