Then, it hit me, I had remembered seeing volume settings before…inside kmix; there is an area for assigning global shortcuts for volume and mute!  This should work for anyone running KDE 3.5.8 and above (I think).  Left click on Kmix in your tray and choose the mixer button.  From there, choose Settings >> Configure Global Shortcuts.  Now assign the volume up, down, and mute keys manually by clicking in the blank and pressing the hardware button.  This should work for a majority of people out there.  For me though, this didn’t work.  When pressing the keys, nothing happened.  I thought I was doomed.

I researched a bit more and found that installing a program called keytouch would allow me to, at the very least, program my keyboard in any way I wanted to program it.  I opened Synaptic and installed keytouch and keytouch-editor.  After install, I went to Kmenu >> System >> Configuration >> Hardware >> Keytouch.  It prompted me to choose my keyboard.  Since it didn’t have the Dell D630, I chose the closest thing which was the Dell D800.  I closed the application and now the volume buttons and mute button works!  Keytouch also has the ability to manually edit and also to import keytouch ‘schemas’ to give maximum flexibility.  Hopefully, this helps some of you out there that cannot get your multimedia keys working in PCLinuxOS and KDE to work!

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Laptop Multimedia Keys and PCLinuxOS 2009 originally appeared on Yet Another Linux Blog on March 17, 2009.

Now there are two ways to do this…kind of. Actually, there is only one way to get programs to autostart but there is another way you can have programs startup when you login…let’s look at both of them.

The First Way

First, go to the PC Menu (or kmenu) >> Run Command >> konqueror –profile filemanagement

When Konqueror opens, navigate to /home/user/.kde/autostart (replace user with your login name). Now minimize that window…we’ll come back to it later. Next up, click on the My Computer icon on your desktop (or for other users, open up Konqueror and put the following in the addressbar: system:/). When that opens, click on applications and minimize the window and place it side by side with the previously opened window.

Hieronymus has posted a helpful tip that simplifies the process above.  After opening up Konqueror, use the Go Menu and click the entry for “autostart” which will take you directly to the correct folder for the current logged in user.  Thanks Hieronymus for the tip!  Visit their homepage here.

You should have something that looks like the following:

Now go ahead and navigate to the application you want to autostart in the applications window. Find the one you want and drag-drop it with your mouse into the autostart window.

That’s it! The program will autostart the next time you login. Didn’t think it would be that easy right? Well, you can even drag and drop shortcuts from the PC (kmenu) menu as well into this window or even shortcuts from the desktop. You can also right click in the folder and create an application link as well…it’s very convenient.

The 2nd Way

The second method is called session saving. This allows you to save a session exactly as it is…perhaps you have email, xchat, and firefox open…you could save this exactly as it is and logout. When you log back in, you’ll have the exact same applications open and waiting for you.

To do this, Open the KDE Control Center. Navigate to KDE Components >> Session Manager. Check the box for on login “restore previous session” and click “apply”. Make sure you look at the bottom text input field for any applications you may not want to restore and list them there. If you don’t know what the application command is, right click on the shortcut and choose properties…and look for the command. If the application is in the PC Menu (kmenu) then right click on the application and choose ‘put into run dialogue’ which will tell you the command to put in the field.

That’s it as well…now when you log back in, you’ll have the same stuff you had open when you logged out

Hope this assists people in the journey with KDE and PCLinuxOS.

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Autostart Apps in PCLinuxOS 2007 (KDE) originally appeared on Yet Another Linux Blog on August 13, 2007.

Today, your mission is to replace WinSCP. You scan through your distro repositories and ask questions in various forums looking for that WinSCP replacement. Sound familiar? It should. I’ve seen this question in many forums and have also seen in it many mailing lists. In fact, I’ve asked this very question myself. WinSCP was a program I had been using for years in Windows. I found it to be one of the best free programs available for the Windows platform for SFTP and SSH connections and file transfers.

The interesting part is that I didn’t need to ask these question. Had I searched for the right terms like “SCP Client Linux” (instead of googling “winscp replacement linux”) I would have found that Linux has a very good replacement in FISH. So if you are searching for a WinSCP replacement after converting into this Linux thing…please read on. You’ll be shocked and amazed that Windows doesn’t have some new fandangled technology like this :p Not only has fish simplified my server administration tasks…it’s revolutionized the way I manage my information on the 5 websites I have. To top it off, it’s built into the Konqueror file manager in KDE which is my primary desktop.

Gone FISHin’

So how does one get fish? If you’re running KDE 3.X or above (and why wouldn’t you be? ;D ) you have it built into Konqueror. The quickest and easiest way I use in PCLinuxOS to access this is to open my home folder. After opening my home folder I type in the address bar “fish://username@website and press enter which prompts me for a password.

After typing in the password and connecting, I’ll normally change the view around so I’m dealing with a detailed look at my files (so I can see permissions, etc). You can change this detailed view to the default view if you’d like by visiting settings >> save view in Konqueror.

So I’m logged into my website using fish now…what does that mean? That means that I’m connected via SSH to my website and I have drag and drop capabilities on it. I can drop a patch for my CMS into place or upload a file. I can rename, change permissions, cut, paste, and do everything I could do browsing my own hard drive in KDE. This includes TABS!

Let’s give a practical example: Say you open up two SSH connections using Fish and tabs. You’re applying a patch for the web based software you run there. So you upload the patches by dragging and dropping them into place (or copying from one tab to the other…whichever you need to do…remember, one tab can be your desktop/home folder)…now let’s take a look at your websites to see how the patches worked. Open up two new tabs (total of 4) with control-T and connect to those websites. That’s right, Konqueror is also a web browser so you can preview what you’re doing with patches AS YOU’RE DOING IT. This makes my updates and file uploads a snap.

As you can see, there is a lot of power in using Konqueror with tabs and the fish protocol. It’s not a hugely robust manager like Krusader for Linux or Total Commander for Windows would be but it gets the job done and it does it quickly…especially for my needs. I’ve found that the tab abilities of Konqueror and fish allow me to quickly apply patches (blog software) for the 3 blogs I admin for…it’s as easy as 1-2-3 copy and pastes. I can simultaneously upgrade using one application instead of having three WinSCP instances running like I did in Windows. To me, fish makes my life and admin tasks more efficient and less bothersome than they were when I used Windows.

Hopefully, you’ll find fish to also help you in your tasks. If you were a WinSCP power user, I’d say that Krusader is more your speed for replacement…but if you were like me and simply used WinSCP to patch and alter php files or config files…perhaps transfer some graphics…you’ll find fish more than meets your needs.

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Going Fishing for a WinSCP Replacement? originally appeared on Yet Another Linux Blog on January 29, 2007.

Alt-F2
Brings up a “Run Command” prompt

Alt-Print and Cntrl-Print
Take a screenshot. You have to paste it from your clipboard

Alt-Esc or Control-Esc
Shows the KDE session manager, from which you can switch to a specific application or log out of KDE.

Ctrl-F[1..8]
Switch to a specific desktop.

Alt-Tab or Alt-Shift-Tab
Cycle through your windows.

Ctrl-Tab or Ctrl-Shift-Tab
Cycle through your desktops.

Alt-F4
Close the current active window.

Ctrl-Alt-Esc
Window destroyer (every window you click on will be destroyed).

Alt-F3
For your Window Menu

Ctrl-Alt-Backspace
This exits KDE but doesn’t save your settings or work.

Ctrl-Alt-Numpad +
Cycles to the next screen resolution available.

Ctrl-Alt-Numpad -
Cycles to the previous screen resolution available.

Hope these help you out…please post any you might have that are helpful and I’ll add them to the list with credits. Thanks again for reading.

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KDE Shortcut Keys originally appeared on Yet Another Linux Blog on January 26, 2006.

Let’s start off by seeing if the cron daemon is even running on your system. Open up a Konsole or Shell and type the following:

ps aux | grep crond

If there is output similar to that in the screenshot, we’re in business because the cron daemon is running. If not, restart cron by typing: ./usr/sbin/crond (may vary by your distro…if you need help, let me know in comments section).

I use PCLinuxOS for my Linux desktop. You can find Kcron by navigating to Kmenu >> Configuration >> Other and selecting it.

Kcron will open and you’ll see the default menu. You should see two categories in the main area: “Tasks” and “Variables”

Variables identifies items you can set to help with your task scheduling. For instance, say you want a custom variable to stand for one users’ desktop…so you’d set the PATH variable to their /desktop. Now remember, when you set this variable, Kcron will use in in lieu of the normal path. There are also other variables you can set. There is extended help on variables in the Kcron handbook. For now though, let’s look at the other item on our list…and, subsequently, the meat and potatoes of what Kcron does. Tasks.

With Tasks, you setup the command you want to execute. This can be something simple like mailing you out a synopsis of logs or even nmap penetration scans. It’s up to you what you want to do with it. We’ll start with something extemely simple to show how Kcron works.

Highlight “Tasks” then select the Edit menu and choose “New”

This should bring up a new task menu. Glancing over this menu, you can see that things are pretty self explanatory. You have dates and times, options for repeating weekly, monthly, or daily. Basically, it’s spelled out for you. This is much easier than the old way of doing crontabs where one had to enter into the crontab file and place asterisk after asterisk and remember what each one of those asterisks meant and try to keep one’s place with all the asterisks to remember which placeholder to flag to enable the cron. Now, it’s as easy as point and click.

For training purposes, we’ll setup a task that should already be setup by default in most distributions…we’ll schedule an index update for file location purposes. Just like windows uses indexing service, Linux has a built in ‘indexer’ (term is used loosely here because it is really a database of your filesystem) that we can populate and update…which you’ll want to do, especially if you install many updates. As stated earlier, this task should already be scheduled in most distributions by default. Let’s practice though by setting it up to run. Looking at the window we opened in the previous paragraph, enter in the comments “My First Linux Task – Updatedb”. Next, for the command, enter “/usr/sbin/updatedb”. Now choose when you want to run it. I chose every Wednesday of each and every month at 9:30 AM. After I set this, I choose “Ok”. Now we must save the task.

Go to File >> Save and now you’re in business. Never forget to save AFTER you’ve altered the task, otherwise your changes will go right out the window.

You can get more creative and add your own custom paths or mail addresses by using variables. As you can see in the screenshot above, I’ve input my mail address in case I want my cron output mailed to me.

Remember, as long as you know the command that you want to do, you just place it in the blank, schedule it, make sure the enable box is checked, and save. For instance, say you want to backup your files for linux to your windows share. You could use the following command to back things up into a handy tar archive:

cd /home/devnet;tar -cvf – * | tar -C /mnt/windows/share/backup -xv

The only limitation is knowledge. If ever you are in doubt of what a certain function entails, open up the Kcron handbook. It might not answer your question but you can get pointed in the right direction. Another good resource would be the developers. If there is one thing I know about KDE its that the developers are always willing answer a rogue question about the functionality of their application.

You can find both the programmers/developers of Kcron and the Kcron handbook under the help menu. Please remember that developers can answer questions about the application but are not there to come up with custom commands for you to use in Kcron…you’ll have to do that legwork yourself! Hopefully, this will get you started scheduling your own backups and tasks.

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Schedule Tasks in Linux with Ease – Kcron originally appeared on Yet Another Linux Blog on December 15, 2005.

In most KDE default KDE desktops on the major distros, you find this little icon:

That icon is Klipper, your clipboard tool. A clipboard is just what it sounds like…a place where you can clip text to be used at a later date. I wanted to take a look at where Klipper came from…so I went into the ‘about Klipper’ menu and emailed a couple of developers. A few actually responded quelling the myth that developers are unreachable by the general public. Carsten Pfeiffer, a previous developer, responded about the history of Klipper:

“It was started long time ago by Andrew Stanley-Jones, for storing a history of clipboard entries. I took over maintainership and added those annoying popups, that appeared, for example when you selected a URL in a terminal or somewhere else. The popup allowed you to do something with the URL, like opening it in Konqueror or Mozilla.

More generally speaking, the feature allowed you to configure custom “actions” to execute when something specific, described with a regular expression was put into the clipboard (see klipper’s Preferences dialog).

Later, I attempted to make klipper hide X11′s IMNSHO broken concept of “Selection” and “Clipboard”, but I didn’t really accomplish that.

Later, Lubos Lunak worked hard on fixing Qt’s clipboard implementation and making klipper play well with it and now I’m very happy that Esben is taking care of it.”

I contacted Esben in an attempt to get some inside information about where Klipper might go in the future (integration into KDE-core perhaps? or other such directions). He was able to provide a few possible directions Klipper may go:

“My vision of Klipper is mostly as a clipboard history application… the actions I merely maintain for those that uses them. Thus the features I have implemented so far has centered on the history: Expanding the history (really making the history scalable), support for images (this was sort of a test, I want to support abitrary mime types in history) and search-as-you type support.”

Now that we know where Klipper came from and where it might be going…let’s take a look at where Klipper can go by making it work for you. By clicking your mouse on Klipper or pressing CNTRL-ALT-V, you can access the menu which shows the text currently stored. When this menu pops open, you can search through it simply by typing your query. Klipper hunts the text down that you’re typing. Easy enough to find text…but where we are concerned with for this article is ‘configure klipper’,which is where you can access the menu where customization is king. Let’s see what we can do. Start by opening up the ‘Configure Klipper’ menu.

You’re greeted by a three-tabbed layout that seems easy enough to navigate. Tab 1 is “General” and is where all of your general settings are stored (go figure) such as pop-ups for Klipper and Clipboard size. Tab 2 is “Actions” and is where all of the application actions are stored (we’ll explain these later). Tab 3 is “Shortcuts” and has to deal with Clipboard shortcuts while you are in various applications. We’ll cover shortcuts later as well. For now, let’s take things one step at a time and access Tab 1. If it isn’t selected, select it now by left-clicking your mouse on the tab labeled “General.” You should see the image displayed at the beginning of this paragraph.

The General Tab

The tab marked general contains your most commonly used settings. Klipper allows cut and past of text with Control X and Control V respectively…just like the other operating system does. However, unlike that other operating system, Klipper has two buffers for storing text. One buffer is the “selection” buffer. This buffer allows Klipper to store text when you use your mouse to highlight it. You wouldn’t even need to hit Control C to copy it or Control X to cut it…it would already be present in the “selection” buffer. Now, this isn’t always right for everyone so you can choose to Synchronize the “selection” buffer with the “clipboard” buffer…that is, the other buffer that Klipper saves things to. This buffer can be thought of as the normal clipboard buffer where text is cut and pasted from and to. The settings that control both of these buffers is located in the middle of the “general” tab under “Clipboard/Selection Behavior.” Selecting “Separate clipboard and selection” will cause your clipboard to be completely separate from your selection buffer. Selecting “Synchronize contents…” will synchronize things so that you can highlight text to copy it.

Another often forgotten function of this “selection” buffer, is the abiltiy to use the middle mouse button to paste. Of course, this is only if your middle mouse button works in Linux…and if it doesn’t, please visit the forum and we’ll get you up and running.

Cycling through the settings, we can see as the first setting “Pop-up menu at mouse cursor.” Toggling this on or off will allow the Klipper pop-up menus to happen either in your KDE Panel or at your mouse position. Next up is “save on exit.” This setting is used to access text that you saved in a previous KDE session in Klipper. The next setting is “Remove whitespace.” I love this setting because it removes extra spaces from the text you select/cut/paste. This is handy for cutting and pasting urls and downloads. The “Replay actions” setting will cause the actions for the text that is present in Klipper to display in a pop-up. We go into further detail on this later.

“Prevent and empty clipboard” does exactly what it sounds like it does so we won’t explain that one. Moving further down, “Ignore Selection” means that when you highlight text, Klipper won’t save it in its selection buffer (which we discussed earlier). So really, “Ignore Selection” is a switch to turn off your selection buffer. The two settings after this were discussed in the previous paragraph so we’ll skip them now. The timeout action for pop-ups sets the time that pop-ups will remain visible to you. The last setting is very simply a way to set how many clipboard entries/items are stored in Klipper.

Actions Tab

If you dabble in programming, the actions tab is for you. Actions are based on the Qt 4.0 regexp class which provides a way to dynamically use text. It is important to note that Klipper does not support the wildcard options in the class noted above. So what can this action tab do? Well, you can setup actions to take place on the text in the clipboard. For instance, in the picture at the beginning of this paragraph, you can see the setting “^V.+\.jpg$”. This setting contains one action beneath it…which is “Kview %s”. The “%s” is an alias that stands for the most recent text selection you have on your clipboard. So…if we were to select text that ended in somename.jpg, Klipper would launch Kview to view this picture since the actions denote that it should. You can add other applications in here if you know what name or expression they use to execute. For more advanced use of this function, see the class link above or try the Klipper Handbook Actions Entry.

One good action I came up with was adding Firefox to my URL action in Klipper. This way, when I selected a URL, the pop-up window asked me if I’d like to open it in Firefox. Of course, I chose yes. This is a very simple example…I hope other people have more they might be able to provide to supplement this article with.

The actions menu can really be a powerful area of customization. However, having not used Klipper as much as I should be and only really getting into using it for the last few weeks…I’m not too experienced in tapping into these settings. If anyone has any suggestions as to actions that work for them or suggestions as to what actions and expressions in this menu might provide a better KDE experience, please comment below.

Shortcuts Tab

The shortcuts tab allows you to change the Keyboard shortcuts that are used to access Klipper. Switch them to whatever shortcut you want. Don’t like Control V for paste? Change it! You can even assign an action a shortcut key combination. Klipper leaves it up to you to decide how you want things…it doesn’t decide for you. To change a shortcut, select “Custom” and make your changes. To return to the normal setting, choose “Default.” You can also blank out your setting by choosing “None”.

As you can see, Klipper makes life much easier in Linux that it ever could be without it. The meat and potatoes of Klipper is the action menu and I wish I had more to give everyone to show them how powerful Klipper could be. I did do some poking around on the net to see if I could find a listing of actions or even a few handy ones but I came up pretty much empty. It seems no one has collected Klipper actions. So, here is as good as any place to collect actions right? If you have an action that you find handy, please post it in the comments below. If it checks out and works great, I’ll post it in this article and give you reference for it. Thanks for reading!

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Make Klipper Work FOR you originally appeared on Yet Another Linux Blog on November 17, 2005.

What is all this K stuff? That’s often the question when people that have never used Linux and KDE ask when logging in to the environment for the first time. The K naming convention is often portrayed as confusing and cheesy, lacking professionalism. Despite these sentiments and harsh feelings, KDE still flexes its muscle as the desktop of choice for most Linux users. For those of you who have just gotten your start in Linux and perhaps for some of you that just haven’t had the time to investigate application Kxxx in KDE, Yet Another Linux Blog seeks to Ktantalize your KDE Ktastebuds and Ksupplement your Knowledge.

This week’s application is one that is often the first that shows itself when KDE initializes at login. A pop up window greets you with a bunch of adjustable sliders…that’s right, it’s Kmix.

NOTE: You can open up Kmix differently in each distribution. It is usually easy to find and is named ‘Sound Mixer’ or ‘Kmix’ by most distributions of Linux. In Kubuntu, it is located under the ‘Multimedia’ section of the Kmenu.

What is Kmix?

Kmix is pretty much what it sounds like. K for KDE and Mix for Mixer. Kmix is the default sound mixing program for KDE. It allows you to control your soundcard. It is used and supported by ALSA (The Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) driver, HP-UX, Solaris, Irix, and all BSD varieties of operating systems. So Kmix allows you to control the volumes, panning(moving sound to the right or left), and which sound card you’d like to have enabled. Y

Multiple Sound Cards? What For?

Many people have the need for two sound cards. For instance, they may want to save music or sound effects at a higher quality and one of their soundcards will do this. Kmix provides a quick and easy way to shift back and forth between the cards and allows access to settings for each. You can select sound cards by toggling the pull down menu under “Current Mixer”.

What are the Settings For?

You can access the settings for Kmix by pulling down the “settings” menu. After that, select “configure Kmix” and a window similar to this will popup:

As you can see, it’s a no brainer thus far to operate…but what do these settings actually tell us? Let’s go through some of the more common settings. We’ll start by explaining all those in the image to the left and then we’ll branch out into some that might be present for only certain types of soundcards.

1. Dock to Panel - Very handy. This allows you to dock Kmix to the System Tray when using the close button
2. Enable System tray volume control - Does exactly what it sounds like it does…it allows control of the volume when Kmix has been minimized to the system tray by the previous setting.
3. Show Tickmarks – this setting displays hash marks on your slider for volume control and panning.
4. Show Labels – This setting displays labels for each sound device when enabled.
5. Restore Volumes on Login - This also does what it sounds like it does…your volumes remain constant through logoff and login. Very handy as well.
6. Orientation – supposedly a setting for the applet to go horizontal or vertical but I’m not sure if this feature is enabled yet. Some mailing list traffic suggests that it hasn’t been enabled yet in KDE 3.4.2. If anyone has corrections to this, please post them in the forum and I’ll correct it and give you a nod here.

What About the Lights?

For the longest time, I didn’t know whether to toggle the LED lights above the volume control to illuminated or deluminated for them to be on. Further investigation told me that when the little green light was on, the sound worked. When the light was off, I enjoyed the silence. There are three colors that Kmix deals you…red, yellow, and green. Green deals with playback sound. Red deals with recording sound. Finally, yellow deals with super secret special soundcard functions…which I don’t have

What do the Tabs Do?

Kmix has three standard tabs. The first is Output. This is the output of your soundcard. You can adjust volumes to your speakers, your headset, or even control surround sound and 3d capabilities. Navigating to the next tab is Input. This tab deals with all things you might record such as a MIC or MIDI sequence. The last tab is Switches. This controls switches for toggling on or off such as bass boost, Mic 1 or Mic 2, and other things.

What’s the slider on the bottom?

The slider on the bottom is for panning your volume to your left speaker or your right speaker. Very simple to operate. The name of your soundcard is displayed in the bottom right hand corner of Kmix. If you notice, mine is integrated sound on my nforce2 Motherboard in my Shuttle X I use as my main PC.

So is that it? I mean, C’mon!

Nope…we’re getting just the basics out of the way. Please remember the different colors of LEDs listed above…they’re imperative to know so that you can tell whether something is muted or unmuted…on or off. Now we begin to get into the good stuff. Hover your mouse pointer over the top of a volume slider and right click (see picture). In this menu you can split channels (show two sliders instead of one), mute, hide, configure shortcuts (keyboard shortcuts), and channels which gives you a dialog box to confirm what you want on/off.

There’s still more of course. Now we get into the applet function. KDE has the ability to run applets, or small programs that run themselves, in its Kpanel. Right click on your KPanel and choose Add to Panel >> Applet >> Sound Mixer. Notice that Kmix now pops up into your Kpanel. You can hover your mousewheel over the top of each volume and raise or lower individual channels. Notice also that the right click menu we spoke of in the previous paragraph also works for the applet. When you’re tired of having it in your menu, right click and choose Remove from Panel >> Applet >> Sound Mixer and it vanishes back again.

Are there even more advanced features?

You bet. However, they’re a bit above my head as I rarely use more than one sound card. The only complicated sound thing I can do is use two sound cards and one set of speakers. For those of you that want to try more complicated features of Kmix, see here.

Ok, now are we done?

Yes. Finally, we’ve covered just about every single function of Kmix. If you have questions or comments, please refer them to the forum since it will provide a better atmosphere for user help (and it will knock some of the cobwebs out of there as well ). Hopefully you have a better grasp of what Kmix is, what it does, and what it is capable of. Thanks for reading and keep posted for next weeks tid bit on more Kapplications.

Please note that the forum has been dissolved and is no longer in service. You may comment below and I’ll still respond

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Get in the mix, the Kmix… originally appeared on Yet Another Linux Blog on October 14, 2005.

Therefore, I opened up this category to record my true learning…true as in I’m going to step through each and every application present in most desktop distros…of KDE. I haven’t even begun to find out what every single application in KDE does or what it is for…I’m just as big of a newb as most people are having started and remained with slackware and the shell for so long. So this will be fun.

I figured that many people switching to Linux probably wouldn’t use half the applications because they most likely wouldn’t know what they are for. With a little help from your friendly neighborhood Linux Blog, hopefully things will right themselves in the KDE world. I’ve also got plans to enter the forray that is Gnome very soon as well. I would cover XFCE but a majority of the programs present there are in both Gnome and KDE so it would defeat the purpose. Perhaps a review of XFCE 4.2.2 would be a good addition to these categories?

Anyway, this first entry serves as clarification on the direction this category will go. Each week I’ll pick out an application (or maybe a few if they are smaller) and I’ll go through the functionality and purpose of the application as well as which desktop distros have this application by default. I’ll also link to the author/homepage for the app. As I said, I hope this helps some people out. I know I was confused the first time I logged in on a desktop distro chock full of applications.

I’ve also found that the Linux Blog forum has been gathering some cobwebs as of late. I think this is a shame because it provides such an organized way of discussion. Thus, I’m closing comments on KWhat? (on all other posts besides this one) and the “yet-to=be-named-gnome” category and redirecting comments and questions on the article to the forum. So this sounds like a good time…if I can get another hard drive (I had one die on me) so that I can get the old PII 350 up and running as a spare test box. That way I can triple boot on two machines and check out different desktop distros simultaneously. So if any of you have a spare 10+ GB ATA hard disk laying around, get in touch with me That’s it for now. Look for Kwhat? to begin sometime this week.

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New Category, New Direction originally appeared on Yet Another Linux Blog on October 9, 2005.