Tux Training

Lets say you installed a new window manager, Musca for instance.  And upon installation, no GDM or KDM session was created so you cannot log into it.  Solving this is rather simple.

cd over to /usr/share/xsessions/

if you ls the directory you’ll see several *.desktop files.  Fluxbox’s looks like this:

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Fluxbox
Comment=Highly configurable and low resource X11 Window manager
Exec=/usr/bin/startfluxbox
Terminal=False
TryExec=/usr/bin/startfluxbox
Type=Application

[Window Manager]
SessionManaged=true

All you really need to do is the following:

cp /usr/share/xsessions/fluxbox.desktop /usr/share/xsessions/musca.desktop
then modify musca.desktop in a text editor so it looks like the following:

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Musca
Comment= Kickass tiling window manager
Exec=/usr/bin/musca
Terminal=False
TryExec=/usr/bin/musca
Type=Application

Running Ubuntu is great until you try to install Kubuntu (or vice versa), because your previously neatly organised menu system goes into overload meltdown with dozens of programs from both desktops fighting for your priority.

But there’s a fix: you can force individual shortcuts to appear only in Gnome or only in KDE as opposed to being in both. To do this, switch to root and browser to /usr/share/applications (for Gnome apps) or /usr/share/applications/kde (for KDE apps). Then open a shortcut file in your text editor, and add one of these two lines to the bottom:

OnlyShowIn=KDE

for KDE-only applications; or

OnlyShowIn=GNOME

for Gnome-only applications.

To have a service menu which opens the selected directory as root in Konqueror, create a file, say konq_root.desktop in ~/.kde/share/apps/konqueror/servicemenus with the following content:

[Desktop Entry]
ServiceTypes=inode/directory
Actions=open_as_root

[Desktop Action open_as_root]
Name=Open as Root
Icon=konsole
Exec=kdesu konqueror %F

Now, if you right click any directory in Konqueror and go to Actions, a new menu appears, Open as Root. If you select more than one directory, Konqueror will open each of them in a new tab.

KDE is one of the most popular and used desktop environments for Linux systems because not only that it looks very much like Microsoft Windows, but it combines ease of use, superb graphical design and new age functionality with high-end technologies of the Unix-based operating systems. Kicker is one of the core parts of the KDE desktop, it is the main panel. This panel can be customized by users in almost every possible way you think of. For example, you can add a lot of useful applets (clock, system tray, show desktop, color picker, desktop preview & pager, dictionary and many more), application shortcuts or you can make it completely transparent

Kicker also has a lot of configuration options that are not revealed in any of the existing graphical user interfaces but can be very useful for advanced users. You must know first that these options are found in the /usr/share/config.kcfg/kickerSettings.kcfg and the /home/yourusername/.kde/share/config/kickerrc configuration files. Below are some of the top tweaks found in the kickerSettings.kcfg file, but nothing stops you to read and modify, as necessary, every option.

Continue reading ‘Kicker’s hidden tweaks’ »

Conky doesn’t display properly with a transparent background in KDE, this is a rather quick fix. Type the following in the command line:

feh –bg-scale `dcop kdesktop KBackgroundIface currentWallpaper 1`

If you use a centered wallpaper, use –bg-center instead.

Also see: Make Conky Transparent and movable

KDE4 applications use CMake instead of autotools as build system. So the usual configure, make, make install that we’re used to will not work. Instead KDE4 uses Cmake. The KDE team decided the switch to Cmake because compilation time is much faster, mainly due to not using libtool anymore and the fact that build files are easier to write,

Many systems have cmake in the repositories, check there first. If you cannot find cmake in the repo’s of your distribution, you can build that from source as well. First download it from here: http://www.cmake.org/HTML/Download.html

Continue reading ‘How to install a KDE4 Package from source with cmake’ »

Many people want the KDE menu on Kicker (Kmenu) to open up using the “Windows Keys” that’s taken over every keyboard in the world. Below is how we accomplish this.

Continue reading ‘Make the Windows Key on your Keyboard open KMenu in KDE’ »