home
about
archivesMigration to KDE4, nvidia, show desktop, quicklaunch, and multiline taskbar
With the migration to Intrepid, I got KDE4. The first impression is ‘wow it is shiny’ ! The second impression is ‘does it work’ (it was not) ? The third impression, once it works, is ‘how does it work’?
I got this second impression because everything was very slow. So I was strongly doubting everything was nominal. Indeed, I was having troubles with the nvidia configuration for KDE4. The one line answer to solve the problem is:
nvidia-settings -a InitialPixmapPlacement=2 -a GlyphCache=1The full solution can be found here. Thanks to him.
Then it was finally working but I quickly understood that I did not know how it was supposed to work. I was lost. I did not know how to get new ‘plasmoids’. I did not understand why I had lost my ‘show desktop’ icon or why I had lost my quicklaunch icons. So first I wanted to have these back. Here is how.
First you need to know that all these features are now “plasmoids”. KDE4 seems to be powered by a soft called Plasma. Therefore, the widgets for plasma are called plasmoids. OK that is logical. To install a new plasmoid you click the taskbar and you click ‘add plasmoid’, simple enough. Then you need to know which plasmoid you are looking for and where to look for, it is a little harder.
The show desktop feature can be activated using the plasmoid ‘show desktop’. It is simple if you have it in the options which was not my cause. So for info, make a sudo apt-get install plasmoid* or sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop and then you will have it in your menu.
For the quicklaunch feature you need the plamoid quicklauncher available on kde-look at this place.
I am still missing a few things :
- a multiline taskbar
- grouping the similar applications (for instance if I have 10 consoles or dolphins) on the taskbar
- having a compress extract menu in dolphin (this link does not work at time of writing)
Overall, I really like KDE4 but I am looking forward to having it more practical and professional. Currently, it reminds me when I played around with OS/2 Warp some 15 years ago. It was shiny and full of good ideas but some basic things were missing (like a practical file manager).
What do you think of KDE4? What are your preferred plasmoids?
Posted in Linux | 6 comments | atom
Trackbacks
Use the following link to trackback from your own site:
http://harryseldon.thinkosphere.com/trackbacks?article_id=26
Hey there!
Thanks for this, I have been considering trying out KDE 4, I’m sure these tips are going to help ;-)
BTW, I don’t seem to be able to subscribe to the feed, I get zero elements :-( At least using the Opera built-in feed reader.
Hey, looks like you are using KDE3.5 so I am sure these tips will help.
About the feeds, all I can say is I have just tested the feeds using netvibes and they work fine. I am not a RSS specialist at all. Actually I have even just created the netvibes account for this test.
BTW as you are a Typo user, I advise you this post about some nice Typo plugins.
Ah, thanks! I’ll have a look at the plugins.
Hmm… I have no idea what I did, but now the feed is working :-) Strange.
Looks like the multiline taskbar and the grouping feature will be ready in KDE4.2.0:
http://www.kde.org/announcements/announce-4.2-beta2.php
“Central elements of the desktop experience have seen significant improvements to give a usable and coherent experience. These include grouping and multiple row layout in the task bar, icon hiding in the system tray, notifications and job tracking by Plasma, the ability to have icons on the desktop again by using a Folder View as the desktop background. Restored features and minor tweaks round out the work, such as the return of panel autohiding to maximise your productive screen space, icons now remain where they are placed in the Folder View, the location of new applets is improved, and window previews and tooltips are back in the panel and Task Bar. ”
After upgrade to Kubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope with KDE4.2, finally KDE4 has :
a multiline taskbar
the possibility for grouping the similar applications (for instance if I have 10 consoles or dolphins) on the taskbar
a compress/extract menu in dolphin