If you’ve migrated to the new Kubuntu 8.10 which came out on October 30th, you definitelly noticed the changes. Kubutu 8.10 runs on a brand spanking new KDE 4.1. Plasma interferce, built in compiz, fresh looking and feeling. It’s great, unless you use hotkeys.
For some reason KDE 4.1 (in Kubuntu at least) does not play nice with the hotkeys. And my hotkeys I mean any application shortcuts or what not you have. For example, I used to have “Ctrl-Alt-M, K” to open up Konqueror (I was using multi-level keybindings). Now I’m forced to use only a simple “Ctrl-Meta-K” because multi-level keybindings don’t work for whatever odd reason. Also, application keybindings like that are now rather hidden and hard to get to AND once you find them, it’s a bit of work to get them to work. Here is how I got it to work, after the jump.
After a bit of google’ing, I came across a rather interesting page (here) on the Ubuntu forums. It’s a whole slew of complains about it. One user (flying_icarus) had a interesting suggestion that worked for ‘me’. Other’s said it didn’t work, for some it did. Try it and see if it works.
1) Start menu editor, assign a shortcut to an application (i.e. for Firefox, I chose “Meta+F”)
To start the ‘start’ menu editor, type the following into the run menu or into the command line:
> kmenuedit
That should do the trick. Find your application (in the examples case, Firefox). The next step gets a bit annoying to do, so many do a few applications at once.
2) Open system settings applet, go into keyboard & mouse under computer administration, choose Keyboard shortcuts and in the fall-down menu instead of “kmix” or something chosen by default select “khotkeys”
An entry “K Menu – firefox.desktop” should now be present. Now, it can happen that it doesn’t appear instantly, or at all untill you start menu editor again and save the configuration again (even if it wasn’t altered), I’m not sure exactly when it appeared. ~/.kde4/share/config/khotkeysrc is instantly updated with the new commands and shortcuts, but it takes some trial & error to get the entries to appear in khotkeys configuration. It may also help to terminate any running khotkeys process and start it again (i.e. from konsole with “pkill -15 khotkeys; khotkeys &” without the quotes and definitely without any sudo prepended).
Essentially, you fiddle with alternatly starting menu editor and system settings untill it appears.
Also, do NOT forgot to close out of the System Settings window completely. For some reason, things did not refresh for me until I restarted khotkeys and closed the settings window (not just back, actually closing the window [Alt-F4 or whatever]).
3) The new “K Menu – firefox.desktop” has preselected the custom shortcut which is “none”, but the default shortcut is “Meta+F” as set in the menu editor in step 1). Now you need to select the default shortcut for this item and confirm to “reassign from menu editor”. After this the shortcut should start working.
If that does not make the hotkeys work, try restarting the khotkey deamon again. That helped me the most. Sadly multi-level keybindings don’t work yet, but oh well. I’ll get used to this single level somehow. If were is a better solution AND if I find it I’ll let ya’ll know asap. Otherwise keep me posted 
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Good reads, love the info, keep up the good work.