KTips is a new group on identi.ca for KDE users to share tips and tricks. If you join the group, you’ll see tips from the KDE community in your timeline. You can also share your own tips by adding !ktips to your messages.

KTips – A new place to share tips about KDE Software

Now some of you might wonder, why another group instead of posting to the existing KDE group? The reason is simple: !kde has all kind of KDE-related topics, and some find it too noisy. If you only want those nifty tips, !ktips is for you. Members of both groups can always crosspost if they want.

Backstory

The idea originates from the “Tip of the day” dialogs – you know, the ones that pop up the first time you start some applications. Although they can contain a lot of useful information, most users close the dialogs down without a second thought. [citation needed]

Uncheck “Show tips on startup” → Close

Personally I never read these dialogs for a simple reason – if I launch Kate, I want to start using Kate right away. Get out of my way.

When I got my new Nokia phone, I could choose if I wanted to receive tips or not. I decided to give it a try and found their approach interesting – occasionally there would be an SMS from Nokia, each time containing a short tip. This way it doesn’t disturb me when I want to use the phone while still keeping me interested.

Today I dented a tip to the KDE group when it hit me – why not make something similar for KDE?

The 140 characters limit on identi.ca ensures that each tip is short and to the point, so the reader won’t be bored. You can read them in your web browser, on your desktop, in your microblog client – basically they won’t get in the way of your work. If you don’t like microblogs but still want to read the tips, you can add the RSS/Atom feed to your feed reader.

Furthermore, you can contribute to it. And it’s extremely easy to do. This should also be a good place to look for content to add to Userbase.

So what are you waiting for? Join today and receive lots of KDE tips – for FREE!

Be free.

However, this post isn’t about Userbase – I hope I’ll find some time to summarize the plans for the wiki here in a few days. Today I want to share another tip that I’ve found and need to remember to add to Userbase: Borderless Maximized Windows.

This option is very useful for devices with small screens, such as netbooks, to give slightly more space to your applications. If enabled, the window border will hide automatically when you maximize a window (and vice versa when unmaximized).

If I remember correctly, this feature was introduced in KDE Software Compilation 4.5 for the Plasma Netbook workspace, where it’s enabled by default. Here’s a short screencast demonstration (what, not an animated GIF!?):

Note that I used double click to maximize the windows. This is configurable in System Settings → Window Behavior → Window Behavior → Titlebar Actions.

Previously I used some window-specific settings to get a similar setup, but it only did it according to some pre-defined rules -  the borders weren’t automatically hidden/shown when a window was maximized/restored.

So how do I enable this in Plasma Desktop?

1. Use you favorite text editor to edit the file
   

   ~/.kde4/share/config/kwinrc

   In some distributions the .kde4 directory is called .kde (or something else like .kdemod4)

2. Add the line
   

   BorderlessMaximizedWindows=true

   under the section [Windows]
   It should look something like this:

   [Windows]
ActiveMouseScreen=true
AltTabStyle=KDE
AutoRaise=false
AutoRaiseInterval=750
BorderSnapZone=10
BorderlessMaximizedWindows=true
CenterSnapZone=0

3. Launch KRunner (Alt+F2) and run the command
   

   kwin --replace

   to restart KWin

4. Go crazy and maximize every window in sight! Remember that you can unmaximize them from the window menu (Alt+F3) or from the task manager in your panel. If quick tiling is enabled (System Settings → Desktop → Screen Edges → Window Management), you can also use Alt+Left mouse button to unmaximize windows by dragging them

Credits this time go to Christian who wrote about this feature in a comment in this blog post. The post also links to a neat widget that’s useful for a setup with borderless windows.

A new course is now open for participation over at the KDE Community Forums. This time the students will use a KDE utility called Krazy Code Checker to improve the code quality of a KDE application of choice, mentored by our own administrator (and System Settings maintainer) bcooksley.

The course requires basic C++ knowledge and a KDE development platform (kdelibs) >= 4.4 (self-compiled or distribution packages). If you want to get a feel of how it’s like, you can take a look at the previous krazy course.

Interested? Head over to the forums and read the course description. If you want to participate, post a reply with the subject you want to work on. Have fun!

Klassroom – Krazy fixes 2 »

week 1

day 1

set 1 – 10
set 2 – 12
set 3 – 10
set 4 – 8
set 5 – max (at least 10)

day 2

set 1 – 14
set 2 – 20
set 3 – 16
set 4 – 14
set 5 – max (at least 20)

day 3

set 1 – 34
set 2 – 40
set 3 – 32
set 4 – 28
set 5 – max (at least 99)

Couldn’t quite manage to do them all? Don’t worry – a lot of people struggle with this week. Just keep on repeating it until you feel confident to move on, and you’ll surely be closer to reach the goal!

Joke aside,

the one hundred push ups program deserves some credit. Who would’ve thought that someone like me could do 100 push ups? Sure I paused a few times to take a deep breath, and during the last push ups some corridor mates probably wondered what the hell I was doing. But I did it.

I’m far from a training maniac – I would rather describe myself as the thin type with most of the muscle mass located below the waist – but I got interested in the one hundred thingy since it sounded like a fun challenge. And I do like challenges.

As expected, it took way longer than six weeks. More like one year and a half. But that’s mostly my own fault – I stopped many times because I was busy with other stuff, and then forgot to continue with the program. After some time I would start from week 1 again.

This time I followed though until I reached the final test after week 6, without having to repeat any weeks; guess the previous training wasn’t a complete waste. And well, you know the rest of the story.

Next challenge: two hundred sit-ups!

Remaining time in the Battery Monitor

1. Right click on the battery and choose “Battery Monitor Settings”
2. Enable “Show charge information” and click on “OK”
3. Quit plasma-desktop with the command
   

   kquitapp plasma-desktop

4. Open ~/.kde4/share/config/plasma-desktop-appletsrc in your favorite text editor (some distributions use other paths, for example ~/.kde/...)
5. Search for the term
   

   showBatteryString=true

   and add the following line directly below it:

   showRemainingTime=true

6. Start plasma-desktop again
   

   plasma-desktop

You may disable “Show charge information” now if you want.

Credits to Sebastian Kügler for posting the instructions on the plasma-devel mailing list. I’ll try to also add them to Userbase when I have some more free time.

Note that I do not want a flame war here about if this should be the default setting/configurable in the GUI – it’s been discussed before, and complaining here won’t make any difference.

Enjoy!

In the Arch community, it’s common praxis to check the wiki before asking a question. Many users also contribute to the ArchWiki by adding content, translating pages and whatnot.

The number of Userbase contributors are growing, but getting on the top list is still very easy – a few edits will do. The wiki is still unknown to a large part of the user base; it doesn’t feel like the natural place to seek and add information about KDE.

Now I’m not going to just sit here and complain. It’s time to do something about this, and I’ve decided to put some time and effort into Userbase once I’ve dealt with a couple of Real Life stuff. First I want to gather feedback from you, the community, and that’s why I’ve written this post. All you need to do is answer this simple question:

Why don’t you use Userbase?

I want to hear the answer from both users seeking information and potential wiki contributors. If you belong to both groups, that’s great.

What would make you use Userbase more, what kind of improvements do you want to see? What’s the most important thing that needs to be done, in your opinion?

I hope you can spare a few minutes to answer the question(s), it’ll be immensely useful. Note that I want to know what can be done on the Userbase side – answers such as “because I’m too lazy” aren’t very helpful.

Thanks for your time.

http://hanschen.org

So now is the time to update your bookmarks and feeds! (Actually you don’t have to – the old URLs should still work. But if you need a little distraction…).

I’ve gathered some tips for new users to get a more familiar desktop, based on frequently asked questions I’ve seen in various places. This is in no way a “10 things you should do” list – it’s up to you to decide which way you like better.

The post is mainly aimed at those who are new to Plasma Desktop, but even experienced users might learn something new.

KDE Plasma Desktop

Just a short note before we begin: the images with a play button are linked to short screencasts – just click to watch them. The screencasts are encoded in GIF and can therefore be played in most web browsers without any additional plugins. The downside is that the quality is quite poor, hope you can bear with it.

Without further ado, here are 10 things you might want to do in KDE SC 4.4:

1. Change the application launcher

The default application launcher in most distributions

Some like it, others don’t – it’s about the default application launcher “Kickoff”. Fortunately, it’s very easy to switch to a more traditional application launcher, similar to the one featured in the KDE 3 series:

Switch to Classic Menu Style

1. Unlock widgets if they’re locked
2. Right click on the application launcher icon and choose “Switch to Classic Menu Style”

There is also a more advanced application launcher called Lancelot. This widget, among others, is usually found in a package called kdeplasma-addons. To find out how to add Lancelot to your panel, see section 6. Tweak your panel.

Classic Menu (left) and Lancelot (right)

2. Switch to a traditional desktop with icons

The “traditional desktop” I’m talking about is the type of desktop where you basically have a fullscreen file manager with a nice wallpaper. You can put icons on it, create new folders and files etc.

Traditional Desktop

The default desktop type in Plasma Desktop behaves in a different way. Instead of icons, you put widgets on it – for example icon widgets, or a widget to show the content of a folder (called Folder View). To switch to a traditional desktop, all you need to do is change desktop type:

Switch to traditional desktop

1. Click on the toolbox (or right click on desktop) and choose “Desktop Activity Settings”
2. Click on “Activity”
3. Change “Type” to “Folder View”
4. Click on “Apply” or “OK”

Options for the Folder View desktop type will appear in the Desktop Activity Settings dialog. Note that you can still put widgets on the desktop if you want.

For more information about desktop icons, see this blog post. Although it’s written for KDE SC 4.2, most of the things are the same in 4.4.

3. Choose your wallpaper

While this is similar to how it works in other workspaces, Plasma Desktop offers some extra functionality that are worth mentioning. If you only want to change the wallpaper image:

Change Wallpaper

1. Click on the toolbox (or right click on desktop) and choose “Desktop Activity Settings”
2. Make sure “Type” is set to “Image”
3. Either select a wallpaper in the list, or click on “Open…” to select an image file
4. Click on “OK”

As you probably have guessed, there are other wallpaper types as well. Below is a short description of those shipped with KDE SC 4.4 (some found in kdeplasma-addons):

Color

Paints a solid color or a gradient between two colors on the desktop.

Virus

Viruses that mutate, spread and slowly eat your wallpaper. The better a virus adapts to your wallpaper, the higher is the chance that it’ll survive and pass on its DNA to future generations.

Virus wallpaper

Mandelbrot

Shows a Mandelbrot set fractal on your desktop. You can move the fractal by holding down your left mouse button and drag the Mandelbrot around. Even better, zoom in/out with your mouse wheel or by holding down the middle button (scroll wheel) and move the mouse cursor up or down.

Mandelbrot wallpaper

Note: If your right click menu disappears after changing to this wallpaper type, you can open the Wallpaper dialog by clicking on the toolbox (located in the top-right corner by default) and press “Desktop Activity Settings”. When you’re happy with your Mandelbrot set it’s possible to lock the view (from the wallpaper dialog) to get the mouse actions – such as the right click menu – back.

Weather

Displays different wallpapers depending on the current weather. You can decide which pictures to show for certain weather conditions from the Advanced dialog.

Pattern

Repeated pattern painted on the desktop.

Image

Probably the most commonly used wallpaper type. Pick an image to show as your wallpaper.

Slideshow

Can’t decide which picture you want on your desktop? No problem, with slideshow you can have them all. The images will automatically switch after a set amount of time.

Globe

A globe for your desktop. There are many different map themes to choose among, and you can set the movement to Interactive, Follow the sun, Rotate and Do not move.

Globe wallpaper

4. Set different wallpaper on each virtual desktop

One feature many ask for is the ability to have different wallpapers on different virtual desktops. This is not directly possible in Plasma Desktop – however, you can have different “desktops”, formally known as activities, on each virtual desktop.

You may think of an activity as what you usually call “desktop”. Other than a name, an activity also has a wallpaper, some features (e.g. display icons) and can contain other widgets – namely the ones you put on the desktop.

The name “virtual desktop” is quite confusing, since it’s actually a group of windows. By default you have the same activity – and therefore also the same wallpaper – on all virtual desktops. To enable different activity on each virtual desktop:

Different activity on each desktop

1. Open the application “System Settings”
2. Browse to “Desktop”, “Multiple Desktops”
3. Check the checkbox “Different activity on each desktop”
4. Click on “Apply” and close System Settings

Now you can have not only different wallpapers, but also different widgets on each virtual desktop.

5. Tweak your panel

The panel, often confused with the taskbar (which is a widget that shows your running applications), can be tweaked in many ways. The first two steps are always the same:

1. Unlock widgets if they’re locked
2. Click on the panel toolbox to the far right, or right click somewhere in the panel and choose “Panel Options”, “Panel Settings”. Note that the latter won’t work everywhere, for example not in the taskbar or system tray

Now you see the panel options. Here are some stuff you can play around with:

Change the height (screencast)

1. Click on the “Height” button and hold down the left mouse button while moving the mouse cursor up or down

Change the width (screencast)

Panel sliders to change the panel width

1. Depending on the panel alignment, you’ll see two or four sliders with arrows. Drag those with the mouse to change the panel width. The arrows pointing out from the panel define the maximum width and the ones pointing inwards the minimum width

Move the panel (screencast)

1. Hold down the left mouse button over “Screen Edge” and drag the panel to the desired screen edge
2. Adjustments can be made with the panel slider pointing at the panel. It’s also possible to change the panel alignment

Add widgets to panel (screencast)

1. Click on “Add widgets…”
2. Drag the desired widgets to the panel or double click to add them

Move widgets (screencast)

1. If you’ve opened the panel toolbox, you can move widgets in the panel with simple drag and drop operations

For more ways to configure your panel, see Plasma HowTo.

In Plasma Desktop, you aren’t limited to one panel – you can add as many panels as you want. However, it’s not possible to change the background and transparency for individual panels – these properties are determined by the workspace theme. If you want to change the appearance for all panels, either change workspace theme or create a custom one. For more information, see the next section 6. Customize the appearance.

6. Customize the appearance

You can change the appearance of many things in Plasma Workspace – everything from icon theme to the look of the window decoration.

Let’s start by launching System Settings and click on “Appearance”. To the left you see a list of modules to configure various parts of the workspace.

Appearance section in System Settings

The names are pretty self-explanatory, so I’ll let you play around with the settings yourself. Just a few notes:

• Most modules have a button to download new content, but there are a few exceptions: application styles, window decorations and fonts. The reason the first two don’t have this button is because native styles/window decorations has to be compiled – they’re best installed through your package manager
  • With that said, the Aurorae Theme Engine allows you to download and install SVG-based window decoration themes. Under “Windows”, select “Aurorae Decoration Theme Engine”, click on “Get New Themes…” and download to your heart’s content
• If you want to use the window grouping feature, only some window decorations support it at the moment – for example the default decoration “Oxygen” and “Tabstrip”
• The workspace theme (panels, widget backgrounds etc.) can be change from “Style”, “Workspace”
  • If you want greater control and change the theme for individual workspace components, click on “Overview” in the toolbar and browse to “Advanced” tab, “Desktop Theme Details”

7. Activate/deactivate screen edge actions

Don’t like how windows maximize or tile when you drag them to a screen edge? Or maybe the desktop effect when you hit the top-left corner with your mouse irritates you? No problem – in either case you just need to change an option in System Settings.

Configure active screen edges

1. Launch System Settings
2. Navigate to “Desktop”, “Screen Edges”
3. Click on the different squares in the monitor to set/unset screen edge actions for that location
4. Use the checkboxes under “Window Management” to enable/disable quick tiling of windows
5. The setting at the bottom enables you to switch virtual desktop by moving the mouse cursor to a screen edge
6. When you’re happy with the settings, hit “Apply”

8. Configure mouse actions on the desktop

Two groups of people will be especially happy for this new feature in 4.4:

• Laptop users who sometimes accidentally scroll through virtual desktop when moving the mouse cursor over the desktop
• Persons who want to set a custom menu to pop up when clicking on the desktop

Even if you don’t belong to either group, you might find this option useful.

Customize mouse actions on the desktop

1. Click on the toolbox (or right click on desktop) and choose “Desktop Activity Settings”
2. Choose “Mouse Plugins”

Each action consist of a row with 4-5 items (from left to right):

1. Trigger - Mouse button/wheel to trigger the action. To change the trigger, click on the button. It’ll remain pressed and say “Input here…”. Now, click with a mouse button or scroll in a direction over the button. Note that you can combine this with modifier keys (such as Ctrl)
2. Action list – Choose the desired action from the dropdown list
3. Configure button (not always shown) – Lets you configure the selected action
4. Information button – Shows an About dialog for the action
5. Remove button – Removes the mouse action

To remove an action, simply press the remove key on the same row. At the bottom there’s a button to add new mouse actions.

If you don’t set “Standard Menu” to any mouse trigger, you can still access the Mouse Actions dialog from the toolbox (by default in the top-right corner).

Similar to other settings in this window, the mouse actions are activity-specific. If you have more than one activity, you have to change the mouse actions for all of them – or you could have different mouse actions on different activities (see section 4. Set different wallpaper on each virtual desktop for more information about activities).

9. Configure other settings

You’ll find more KDE software options in – surprise, surprise – System Settings. Here are some favorite modules of mine:

• Look & Feel: Desktop, Desktop Effects – If your hardware supports compositing and you’ve installed the required drivers, it’s possible get various useful (and less useful) desktop effects. In this module you can Suspend/Resume Compositing (Alt-Shift-F12 is faster if you do it regularly), play around with effects and find other relevant options
• Look & Feel: Desktop, Launch Feedback – I don’t like the bouncy icon that appears when you launch applications, so that’s one of the first things I disable in this module
• Look & Feel: Window Behavior, Window Behavior – A lot of options to control how your windows should behave
• Computer Administration: Keyboard & Mouse, Global Keyboard Shortcuts – Configure global keybindings. Change the components with the “KDE component” dropdown list
• Computer Administration: Input Action – More advanced module to set different input actions, such as keyboard shortcuts, mouse gestures and window actions
• Advanced User Settings (Advanced tab): Autostart – Manage autostart programs and scripts
• Advanced User Settings (Advanced tab): Session Manager – If you find that applications not listed in Autostart still start up with Plasma Desktop, it’s probably because you restore the previous session (“A session contains of a collection of applications as well as application-specific information that reflects the state of the applications at the time the session was saved” — Techbase). This module lets you change this behavior under “On Login”. Personally I like the option “Restore Manually saved session”. When this option is selected, the session can be saved from Kickoff (the default application launcher) or the classic menu

If you find it troublesome to navigate back and forth in System Settings, you might prefer the classic tree view style:

Tree View in System Settings

1. Launch System Settings
2. Click on “Configure” in the toolbar (if you’re inside a module, you can’t see this button)
3. Select “Classic Tree View” under “View Style” and click on “OK”

10. Check out online resources

To round off, here are some recommended KDE websites where you can find more interesting things:

• kde.org – The official KDE site where you’ll find announcements,  useful information about various parts of KDE and links to other relevant sites
• userbase.kde.org – Wiki for KDE software users. The screencasts in this post were taken from http://userbase.kde.org/Plasma/HowTo/4.4
• forum.kde.org – KDE Community Forums. Here you can get help from other users (including contributors such as KDE developers), post ideas in Brainstorm, have discussions with KDE enthusiasts and much more
• kde-look.org – Get new themes, wallpapers, icons, widgets and other stuff. Or why not share your own creations?
• kde-apps.org – Same as kde-look.org but for KDE applications

I hope you found some of the tips useful; if you think I missed something, just drop a comment below. Feedback in general is also much appreciated!

Plasma HowTo - Move Widget

The screencasts are small and can be played in almost any graphical web browser, at the expense of reduced image quality. Given that the screencasts are meant as HowTos and not for showing off Plasma Desktop, I think the lacking quality is acceptable (for now) considering the advantages. In the future, with HTML5 and whatnot, the format will probably be Ogg Theora.

If you want to create your own animated GIF screencasts, I have written a small guide here (updated yesterday).

Tip for translators

The Plasma HowTo is quite easy to translate since it doesn’t consist of much text. Nevertheless, I much appreciate the work of those who’ve translated the page already – thank you. Here’s a tip on how to update the translation for 4.4:

If the translation is up-to-date with the 4.3 version of Plasma HowTo, this will be simple. Most of the content is the same, so you can copy the old translation to the new version. However, you need to update the links to the new screencasts. This is easily done in a text editor by replacing all “.gif” with “-44.gif” (without “”).

To see the other changes, go to “History” for the English version and compare the latest version with the second version (with the comment %s/\.gif/-44.gif/g). Fix those changes, and you’re done.

On Thursday 4th February 2010, the KDE Community Forums is holding a new event called Answer Day. The event will start 00:00 UTC (ends 23:59 UTC), and everyone can participate! We’ll focus on doing the following two things:

• Answer unanswered questions

  In the forums, KDE users can ask questions and help other users. Usually you’ll get an answer pretty fast, but some questions might have been overlooked or nobody knows the answer.

  The forum has a feature to list the 1000 latest unanswered topics. Not all are questions, but you’ll find a large portion of posts waiting for answers here. So during the Answer Day, we encourage everyone to actively seek unanswered questions to answer.

  

  What to do: Click on “View unanswered posts” in the panel, browse through the list and answer as many questions as you can/want to.

• Mark topics as solved

  Before posting a question, it’s recommended that you search the forums first to see if the topic has been covered before. To make it easier to find answers, the forums have a plugin to mark topics as solved (it’s also possible to only search for solved topics).

  A solved topic will show up with a next to the title in forum view (where you see a list of topics). Clicking on the green checkmark will take you directly to the answer. In topic view (inside a topic), is shown in the title of the post with the best answer.

  Choosing the best answer is something the topic starter has to do by clicking on under the post with the solution (can be undone with). Sometimes, however, this isn’t done – maybe the topic starter didn’t know about this feature, or he/she forgot to click on the button.

• What to do: If you find a solved topic while browsing around in the forums, report the post with the answer by clicking on underneath it. Choose “The reported post does not fit into any other category, please use the further information field.” in the dropdown menu and optionally enter a comment in the text box below. Someone in the forum team will take a look at the reported post and mark the topic accordingly.

  It has to be clear that the question has been answered, for example if the topic creator has replied “Thanks for the answer, that worked perfectly”, of if you know that the answer given is 100 % correct and the only possible answer.

We hope that Answer Day will be successful and eventually become a forum tradition. What do you think about this event, and forum activities in general? Suggestions and feedback are always appreciated.