KDEslackindowsboxen

Well, today I installed KDE again. Only to make a long story short*, I used VirtualBox on Vista32 to host Slackware64 and KDE. The results should show to anyone that KDE 4 does not look like Vista... (the proof that Windows 7 does not look like KDE 4 is left as an exercise to the reader.)

* the long version of the short story:
I had Mandriva installed on a second partition on this laptop alongside the factory installed Vista Home Premium. It mostly worked, but after months of occasional tweaking, many drivers were still not working fully. This included the wireless, which was sometimes working under ndiswrapper, but flaky, the touchpad, which didn't work at all, the touch screen, which didn't work at all, the built-in wacom digitizer on the screen, the fingerprint scanner, the webcam, double-layer burning, composite drivers, external display, printer, and so forth. Due to these and many related issues, I spent most of my time in Vista, occasionally playing with KDE/Windows to my occasional fancy. For the record, KDE/Windows works fairly well for many things, but for others, you simply cannot beat a good-old-fashioned unix system. The final straw was that fish:// didn't work for me under windows, and I was wanting to use Kate/Windows to edit files over the wireless network. So! I decided it was time to try a virtual machine. VirtualBox has the license that makes me happiest, and generally works with a higher level of quality than I've come to expect from the average Sun product, so I tried it. It was then that I realized that my Vista partition was approaching full, so I decided to reformat my Linux partition to NTFS. OOps, bootloader stored files there. Okay, don't panic. Vista won't boot. Install Linux again as I can't find a LiveCD and my Mandriva USB key from Glasgow wasn't booting for some reason. Make a backup of my important docs to an external drive. Try using fdisk from a Win98 install CD to fix the MBR: No dice. Try using the HP rescue stuff that came with the Laptop: it tells me it failed to recover the boot thingy. Okay, forcing my hand, do a full system restore from the factory. Ouch - several hours later - remove 2/3rds of the items from Add/Remove programs. I don't know why HP doesn't give the option on install to skip all the 3rd party shit. Finally, install VirtualBox. I have a Slackware64-current disk on hand from a few weeks ago when I reloaded my desktop machine, so I try booting that: it says that although I have a 64-bit processor, I have to go to my BIOS and enable the hardware virtualization stuff to use a 64-bit guest OS under a 32-bit host. After doing that, I can install slackware. Yay! Last but not least, since KDE takes down the system about 20 seconds after loading, I figure out that I need to install the VirtualBoxAdditions stuff that lets the linux kernel/X/etc. run smoothly under the Virtual Machine. Whoa! this works great! I now have a real linux install of KDE that can more-or-less seamlessly integrate with Vista. On the upside, I get to piggy-back off of vista's drivers. If Vista is online, so is Slackware. My touchscreen works (mostly, the touchscreen events are translated to X mouse events, so no pressure sensing), my touchpad works great, including scrolling, and the VirtualBox X drivers even allow access to 3D accelleration through my Windows drivers. Neat. The only slowdowns I've noticed in Slackware are when it's using heavy disk io, and Windows always gets one CPU to itself. Whew! Now that was a mouthfull...