Trinity

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The Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE) project is a feature rich desktop environment for Unix-like operating systems with a primary goal of retaining the overall KDE 3.5 computing style. TDE is a fast, stable and mature desktop for Linux.

About TDE

The current stable release of TDE (14.0.0) was released December 16 2014. Current development is on 14.1.0.

Trinity is an independent fork of KDE 3.5 using a separate developer community. Continued development by the Trinity Project has polished off many rough edges that were present in the final release of KDE 3.5.10. Many new and useful features have been added to keep the environment up-to-date.

R14 is intended to be a true TDE release with all branding, artwork, and graphics changed and updated for this project rather than using holdover KDE3 stock images. The significant improvements and changes to the R14 codebase have been backported to 3.5.13-sru. The desktop functions on current graphics libs, systemd, libusbx, udisk2 and other newly implemented hardware paradigms.

Build from source

As of July, 2015, there are no Arch LInux Trinity packages, so you will need to create your own. See Creating packages for more information on how to create Arch packages.

To download the R14 source tarballs, follow the Download Source Tarballs link near the bottom of the Trinity R14.0.0 Release page.

The sources are in a git repo. More info on cloning it is at their GIT information page.

The suggested build order is specified in the How to Build TDE page.

Building on Arch

Warning: Trinity on Arch must be built in a clean environment without KDE4 present.

Set up your chroot for building by referencing DeveloperWiki:Building in a Clean Chroot. Make sure you configure your local repository in $CHROOT/root/repo and add each package built to the repository as outlined in the DeveloperWiki.

Example
 # mkarchroot -u $CHROOT/root
 # makechrootpkg -c -r $CHROOT
 # makechrootpkg -r $CHROOT    

Which means respectively:

  1. update the chroot
  2. build first package with the -c option
  3. build remaining packages without update

Start and configuration

After a successful install of TDE, the tdm desktop manager can be used to start TDE (and all other desktops) in the same manner kdm is used to start KDE Plasma. The init script for the display manager has been renamed from kdm to tdm to avoid conflicts. TDE includes a tdm.service file allowing systemd to start tdm at boot. TDE can also be started from the command line by including the path to starttde in your ~/.xinitrc. Either way launching tdm or TDE is straightforward.

Enable tdm.service in systemd to start tdm at boot

If systemd is configured to boot the default multi-user.target (default), all that is required is to configure tdm to start at boot is to enable tdm.service.

If you encounter any problem, the default.target may have manually configured. See Display manager#Loading the display manager for resolution.

Configure to work with startx

Trinity provides a normal starttde. If you've followed the Arch packaging guidelines, it will be in /usr/bin. The easiest way to start Trinity is to simply add starttde at the end of ~/.xinitrc. If you do not presently have ~/.xinitrc, then simply copy it from /etc/skel or create it with the following entry:

~/.xinitrc
exec starttde

Then from the command line, just type startx. More about xinitrc.

See also