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I have several distributions on my computer, including both SuSE and Gentoo. All share a /home partition. I use KDE 3.3.1 on all of them. However, if after I use SuSE, then when I use Gentoo it gives me errors about not loading applets, and several applets on my panel don't show up, such as the KMenu. This problem seems to be specific to Gentoo; I can run KDE on Fedora Core 3 with the same partition without a problem. Does anyone know how to get these distros to cooperate, or to make Gentoo use a different KDE directory than the others?

Gentoo does replace /.kde with a symlink to its own /.kde3.3 (the others just use /.kde), but KDE seems not to use the /.kde3.3 directory if the /.kde symlink is not present. Any way to change this behavior? Would this require a recompile of KDE? I know the KDE setup works because renaming /.kde3.3 to /.kde3.3-bak or something does let me create a new configuration in Gentoo, which works fine until I next use KDE in SuSE. I am looking for a more robust solution.

Thanks.

I did figure out how to edit the /usr/kde/3.3/bin/startkde script so that Gentoo uses its own config location. I commented out the code that modifies /.kde, and updated /.kde3.3 to /.kde3.3gentoo to ensure that any other distros that may use /.kde3.3 will work. I set it to export my KDEHOME to /.kde3.3gentoo and set the kdehome variable within the script to /.kde3.3gentoo. Now it works fine out of /.kde3.3gentoo and doesn't mess with my /.kde. (All /.kde and /.kde3.3gentoo paths are actually inside my home directory and referred to as ${HOME}/(whatever) inside the script).

This works and is an acceptable solution to the problem. However, does anyone know why sharing one directory doesn't work or how I can fix it?

I did also notice that the config that didn't work in Gentoo also didn't work the next time I booted SuSE after Gentoo.