kde Archive

KDropbox – Native Dropbox for KDE
Posted on April 28, 2010 | 1 Comment
KDropbox is an application which offers almost the same features as the official Dropbox Linux application, but works on KDE.
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How to Install And Setup Ubuntu One In Kubuntu
Posted on March 23, 2010 | 3 Comments
Last year MTE gave you a hands on review of the beta release of Ubuntu One, Canonical's answer to the popular Dropbox file syncing service. Ubuntu One allows users to have a local folder on their computers linked and synced with a folder on an Ubuntu One server.
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Kubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala (Alpha 4) Overview & Screenshots
Posted on August 21, 2009 | No Comments
The fourth alpha of Ubuntu 9.10 was released a few days ago and since I covered it earlier in this article, here I'll briefly overview Kubuntu, the KDE-based distribution of Ubuntu. All the screenshots were taken after a complete dist-upgrade, so the software should be completely up-to-date as of today.

The new Karmic currently comes with Linux kernel 2.6.31, KDE 4.3, Amarok 2.1.1 as the audio player, Dragon Player as the default video player. In one of my previous articles I pointed out some of the new features in KDE 4.3, some of which are implicitly included in Karmic, like the new Plasma look, called Air, or the new KRunner.

Konqueror is a hell of a browser, with countless features and ease of use for those who are already used to it. These are not all, but it comes with web shortcuts, enabled AdBlock filters, profiles, plugins, shortcut to various web page translations, user agent switching and so on. There was a time when Konqueror was very unstable, but now I encountered no crashes, with Flash enabled. On the other hand it was always mature regarding features and usability, since the KDE3 days. YouTube works fine also, but I had to manually install the Flash plugin, although package flashplugin-nonfree was already installed.

Compared to the current stable Kubuntu, this one seems to be more responsive and faster, although resizing windows with desktop effects enabled can still be slow, but I tested this on my older GeForce 7600. Compositing works very well in KDE 4.3, at least that was my experience with it, and all the KDE applications interact good enough, but Firefox or GTK applications for example may be a little choppy (for example when using the Magic Lamp desktop effect). Of course, this is an alpha.

Some windows still have simple size issues, they are either too small or too big and need resizing.

One thing that bothers me at Konsole is that it still doesn't include a right-click context menu to close separate tabs, instead this functionality is available using Ctrl+Shift+W.

For some reason the Save as dialogue in KSnapshot won't show certain files, although their extension is the same selected in the dialogue. I noticed this happens only when saving on partitions mounted manually. This seems to happen at random.

Amarok 2.1.1

Since this is an alpha, there are still bugs and most of them come in applications which are not included in KDE, for example in Amarok 2. Also, the sound system doesn't seem to work, although this is a KDE problem I think, because on Ubuntu it does work.

Overall, this looks promising. The developers will have enough time to polish it until October, and KDE 4.3 really behaves very nice, not to mention the look.

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Yakuake : A pull down terminal for your desktop
Posted on August 1, 2009 | No Comments
If you are addicted to doing things on terminal, yakuake is your friend. Yakuake is a KDE application and it takes the standard KDE Konsole and changes it to a drop-down, on-demand terminal over your desktop and applications. This is a very handy little application. ( It resembles the classic game quake in showing the console screen on your desktop.)

To install, simply use

$ sudo apt-get to install both konsole and yakuake

If yuo are on Ubuntu open up a terminal and run yakuake from the terminal.
It will prompt you with the following screen .

Yakuake is prompting you to set a short cut key .The default is F12 . However on my Ubuntu desktop F12 is bound to search. So I clicked on the button and changed the default key to F10.
Press ok and save the configuration.
Now if you press your short cut key , yakuake terminal will pop up. If you press it again , it will hide itself. The appearance and behaviour of yakuake can be controlled. from its menus. You can access the menu by clicking on the down arrow symbol on the bottom right corner of yakuake window. Yakuake recognises almost all settings of konsole the KDE terminal.
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Reset KDE4 Without Reinstalling
Posted on July 15, 2009 | 1 Comment
Today I ran into a small, yet crippling problem with KDE4 after using it for a whole two days. I found a quick and easy solution to get back on my feet.
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