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Milestone 8: KDE Plasma

For this milestone, you will install and start the KDE Plasma desktop environment. Once KDE Plasma is running, you will have a working graphical desktop on your Raspberry Pi.

Page Contents

Milestone Worksheet

Please download the following worksheet for Milestone 8. To be sure your browser downloads the file instead of trying to open it, right-click the following link and choose “Save As,” “Save Link As,” or similar language from the menu. (Each browser is a little different in what wording it uses.)

Background

Please read the following background lesson:

As you complete the reading, fill in the top part of the Milestone Worksheet. Note that you will need to return to these instructions in order to get the commands needed for the steps in this milestone like you did in the previous milestone.

Procedure

Use the above documentation to work through the following steps:

  1. Boot the Pi and log in as your regular user.
  2. Run system updates (see the first step of the Milestone 6 for a reminder) and reboot if the linux-tealpi5 package gets updated.
  3. Install fonts.
  4. Install KDE Plasma.
  5. Configure Plasma scaling.
  6. Add the KDE Plasma startup script.
  7. Start KDE Plasma.
  8. Configure the appearance to make the active title bar teal and the inactive title bar bronze.
  9. Disable Desktop Search.
  10. Set the Region and Language settings to their American English values.
  11. Configure spell check for American English.
  12. Change the wallpaper to something other than the default.
  13. Exit KDE Plasma (go to the start menu, click leave, select Log Out, and confirm). You may need to press the Enter key to get a fresh command prompt in the console.
  14. Restart KDE Plasma so that the Region and Language settings take effect.
  15. Leave KDE Plasma open to prepare your submission screenshot (next section).

Submission Guidelines

Open a Konsole window by going to the start menu, then the System category, and pick Konsole. Alternatively, press CTRL+ALT+T. In the Konsole window, run the following commands:

hostname
date

Check Your Work

Verify the following:

  1. KDE Plasma is running.
  2. Your CCU username is part of your hostname in the Konsole window.
  3. The date and time are set correctly.
  4. The color of the title bar in your active window is teal.
  5. The date and time in the lower right corner of the screen are following the US format. The time should be in a format like “3:03 PM”, and the date should be in a format like “3/4/25”.

Prepare Your Submission

While we now have a screenshot tool (Spectacle) available, we won’t have an easy way to get the screenshot off the Pi until the next milestone. For now, use your phone one last time to take a picture of your screen. Be sure that it shows the whole KDE Plasma desktop.

Transfer the photo to your computer, and replace the placeholder image in the Milestone Worksheet with your photo. Export the worksheet to PDF format, and upload the PDF to Moodle as the submission for the Milestone 8 assignment activity.

As a reminder, here are the instructions for editing the worksheet in either LibreOffice or Word Online:

ABET Assessment

Successful completion of this assignment satisfies the following performance indicator: