By default KDE4 sets the GTK2_RC_FILES to /etc/gtk-2.0/gtkrc:$HOME/.gtkrc-2.0::$HOME/.kde4/share/config/gtkrc-2.0 in the function applyGtkStyles() inside krdb.cpp (kde-base/systemsettings). When using a multilib profile the system config dirs for gtk+ are something like /etc/gtk-2.0/${CHOST} so the system settings are not considered.
Please explain more... which KDE version? Which part of KDE are you talking about? We are not GTK experts, so please explain what is happening!
I'm currently using KDE-4.5.4 + some GTK applications but the problem doesn't depend on the KDE version. I'm not a GTK expert too. In particular, I have found a problem using a GTK application, pavucontrol, which fails to find some icons (see attachments below). I'll describe what I found for the specific application but I think the problem is more general. The current GTK theme configured by gtk-chtheme is Raleigh which is included in the default installation. The KDE theme is Oxygen. pavucontrol doesn't render correctly (bad-rendering.png) because it can't find some icons. Looking at the pavucontrol source code the three needed icons on the right are: - audio-volume-muted - stock_lock - emblem-default All the icons are available in the path /usr/share/icons/gnome/ but, using the default configuration, the second and third icons are not loaded. The first icon is displayed becuase is present also in the Oxygen theme. Here are the files in my system: $ locate audio-volume-muted.png /usr/share/icons/gnome/*/status/audio-volume-muted.png /usr/share/icons/oxygen/*/status/audio-volume-muted.png $ locate stock_lock /usr/share/icons/gnome/*/status/stock_lock-broken.png $ locate emblem-default /usr/share/icons/gnome/*/emblems/emblem-default.png The problem is given by the fact that the application doesn't look into the /usr/share/icons/gnome/ path. This is strange because the default gtkrc config file, regularly installed with gtk+2.0 (/etc/gtk-2.0/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/gtkrc), contains the directive gtk-fallback-icon-theme = gnome So it seems the file is not read during the init of pavucontrol. GTK+ uses the GTK2_RC_FILES variable to discover the location of the config files. The variable should be set automatically by KDE but is not correctly set on a multilib system (the right system path should be /etc/gtk-2.0/${CHOST}/ instead of /etc/gtk-2.0/). If I launch pavucontrol with $ GTK2_RC_FILES="/etc/gtk-2.0/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/gtkrc:$GTK2_RC_FILES" pavucontrol then I got the correct behaviour (snapshot good-rendering.png)
Created attachment 258873 [details] bad-rendering.png
Created attachment 258875 [details] good-rendering.png
Created attachment 258877 [details, diff] systemsettings-gtkrc-multilib.patch This is a simple proof of concept patch to =kde-base/systemsettings-4.5.4 to build correctly the GTK2_RC_FILES variable. The patch is just a demonstration, it misses autodetection of the $CHOST.
Is this still a problem with kde 4.7.2?
The problem is now fixed in >=gtk+-2.24.0 and I'll close this bug as a dupe of #288549.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 288549 ***
