>>> My first usability test of Trinity was in a virtual machine. Trinity
>>> loaded just fine --- but ignored all of my previous ~/.kde profile
>>> settings. Hey! What? :)
>>>
>>> Not to mention the evil bouncing mouse cursor! Okay, I can solve that
>>> irritant when I build the package.
>>>
>>> What happened with my desktop?
>>>
>>> First clue: Trinity is using ~/.kde3 rather than ~/.kde. Yet my
>>> $KDEHOME
>>> environment variable is set to ~/.kde. Hmm. Where is this being ignored
>>> or
>>> overridden?
>>>
>>> Yes, I can rename ~/.kde to ~/.kde3. But I should not have to. Trinity
>>> should honor my $KDEHOME variable.
>>>
>>> First suspect: /usr/bin/startkde. I have some proposed patches for
>>> startkde, but that can wait for another thread. Nope. Not the culprit
>>> because I exited KDE, restored my ~/.kde profile, renamed the new
>>> startkde, and restored my old startkde. When I started X, Trinity again
>>> created ~/.kde3 and ignored my ~/.kde profile and $KDEHOME variable..
>>>
>>> What is hard-coded to create and use ~/.kde3? A .desktop file
>>> somewhere?
>
> ~/.kde3 is set in kstandarddirs.cpp and also in startkde.  startkde now
> has a fix to honor the $KDEHOME environment variable, and
> kstandarddirs.cpp has always had code to honor it.
>
>>>
>>> Been a looooong time since I wandered around with the KDE startup
>>> sequence.
>>>
>>> Second, there are folder icons on the desktop for every directory in
>>> the
>>> root level. They are not device icons and I don't know how to disable
>>> that
>>> effect. I also have lost my previous desktop icons.
> <snip>
>
> I am looking into this one, which fortunately I am still able to replicate
> on the older machine I mentioned earlier.  Something is messed up with the
> XDG desktop paths; on my system "kde-config --userpath desktop" returns
> "/".
>
> Tim

OK, I think the problem has been fixed in revision 1176159.  Slackware
must not set up XDG correctly; Trinity needed some default settings added
to handle this particular case.

Update kdelibs and kdebase, and recompile/reinstall both.  Hopefully that
will get you a functional desktop, and the minor issues can be debugged
more easily.

With respect to ~/.kde3, how did you set HDEHOME?  On my systems I would
do this in the terminal:

export KDEHOME=~/.kde
/opt/kde3/bin/startkde

Once kdebase has been updated it should respect the above sequence (I will
check it myself after recompilation is finished).

Tim