KDE 4 was NOT feature complete when it came out in the 4.0 version.  It IS feature complete (in my opinion) with the 4.2 and 4.3 versions.

Ignorant Reason #1 – I hate Dolphin and I Can’t Have Konqueror Anymore

Wrong, you can use Konqueror.  You don’t have to use Dolphin, but you’ll be missing out on a lot of useful stuff.  Tell you what, now that you know that you don’t have to use Dolphin, why not use KDE 4 and give Dolphin a try every so often…you can still use Konqueror in the meantime and now that you know you can, you don’t have to go around trumpeting that you can’t to everyone who will listen and saying what a piece of crap it is.  Forget that you’ll lose nepomuk and the semantic desktop by dismissing dolphin.  Don’t know what that is?  Let me google that for you…

I sure hope this solves many peoples beef with KDE 4 right out of the gate because this is one of the reasons I find all over the web.  I really think the problem is the lethargic attitude that prevails from die hard KDE 3 fans.  Honestly guys, give Dolphin a try…it’s really a pretty decent file manager and is light years ahead of any other DE file manager.

Ignorant Reason #2 – I Can’t Have Folders or Files on the Desktop Anymore

Wrong.  Right click on the desktop and choose “Desktop Settings”.  Select the drop down menu “Type” and select “Folder View”.  Your desktop now has folders, icons, and all other such things that you may want to clutter it with.

If you want to switch back to NOT using the folders and instead use widgets…right click on the desktop and choose “Folder View Settings” >> Select Type >> Desktop.

To top it off, if you select “Folder View”, the folders and icons act exactly like you would expect them to in KDE 3.  Not only can you select to show your desktop folders…but you can even show a folder like /home as your default desktop…show any folder you have access to, it’s up to you.  Yay right?  I give it a golf clap.  Let’s continue thinking out of the box and bust a few more myths.

Ignorant Reason #3 – I Can’t Move My Panel to the Top, Right, or Left.

Wrong.  Click the settings icon on the right hand side of your panel (it looks like a comma on the far right side of the panel).  The settings area pops open.  On that bar is something called “Screen Edge”.  Now, it seems pretty self explanatory that when you hover over the top of it, it gives you the 4 arrow icon that means you can drag and drop the panel wherever you want to…and being named “screen edge” seems to imply “which screen edge…left, right, bottom, or top…do I want this thing to appear on”.  Then again, I can see how screen edge can confuse people when you open the settings of a panel that resides on the screen edge.  Ok, maybe I can’t.  Well, at least you know you can move your panel around right?  Golf clap again?  Who plays golf anyway?

Ignorant Reason #4 – I Can’t Resize Folders and Files in Dolphin

Wrong again.  Are you sensing a pattern yet?  Open Dolphin, go to the directory where you want to increase the folder size.  Hold the control key down…now roll your mouse wheel and be amazed as the folder size increases.  Invest all your money in Yet Another Linux Blog stock and move to Nicaragua.  Golf clap on your way to expedia.com for purchasing tickets.

Ignorant Reason #5 – I Like to Use My Own Color Schemes…I Can’t Do That in KDE4.

System Settings

KDE4 absolutely allows you to create your own color schemes.  It really helps to look around inside the system settings tool.  Go to your Kmenu >> System >> System Settings.  Once there, look for Appearance.  You can also use the top search

Appearance Colors

bar to look for any term…so if you were to type “color” there, you’d see that Appearance & Display are returned.

Click on Appearance and you’re taken into a wonderful world of color and granular control of said color.  Change anything you’d like….go crazy.  I hear pink is the new green…or is it green that was the new pink?  Whatever.  The only limits are your imagination.  For those without imagination.

Ignorant Reason #6 – The Default Menu is Cludgy and Different and I Can’t Find Anything in KDE4

Now there is no right or wrong here…you could be right depending on who you talk to.  However, the nice part about KDE4 is that they include the previous menu for you.  Right click the Kmenu and choose “Switch to Classic Menu Style”.  Now your menu is the exact same as it would be in KDE 3.5.10.  Please remember that answers are out there…you just have to search for them.

Closing the Door on Myths

Hopefully, this closes the door on many misconceptions helps people who are ignorant to the leaps and bounds that KDE4 has made just in the past few months.  I’ve grown very tired of journalists and bloggers taking swipes at KDE4 and spreading misinformation about it.  If you have any questions about how to do something in KDE4, please leave a comment below and let’s work together in finding a solution.

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Hate KDE4? Ignorance Is Probably the Culprit originally appeared on Yet Another Linux Blog on July 23, 2009.

I’ve not used many of the whiz bang functions of KDE and desktop Linux…I’ve been more of a browser, mail, and RSS type of guy for many years. Now that I’ve been using Linux at work and at home, I’ve been blessed with the opportunity to figure out how to do things that I’ve never done before. In this case, convert audio to .wav, .ogg, or .mp3 with ease. There is a tool called audiokonverter available in PCLinuxOS 2007 repositories that makes this a snap.

Open up Synaptic and do a search for Audiokonverter. Install it and accept all marked packages as well. Now, rip those CD’s or navigate to the audio files you want converted in Konqueror.

Once there, select all the files you want to convert and right click them. In the right click menu is a new option available for you…Actions >> Convert to. Select this option and convert to any format you so desire (ogg, mp3, aac, wav, and flac). Tell the pop up where to place the newly converted file and enjoy your music in its new format! What a fantastic tool that makes listening and managing music libraries so much easier.

Please note: There is only one caveat to this fantastic tool…it won’t convert music in your mounted samba shares. You’ll first have to copy the music to a local drive and convert it from there. Despite this limitation, it’s quite a fantastic tool!

UPDATE: Make sure you install the “lame” package in PCLinuxOS via Synaptic. This allows you to move from various formats of audio to mp3.

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Convert Audio with Ease in KDE originally appeared on Yet Another Linux Blog on August 16, 2007.

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.

This is something that is often expressed in the forums at pclinuxos.com and something anyone associated with this fine distribution is glad to see…that is working wireless. However, as noted above, people often wonder how to control their wireless device and how to move in and out of various different environments. I’d like to share how I do wireless on my Thinkpad a22m.

I have a US Robotics 5411 MaxG PCMCIA card for my laptop. PCLinuxOS 2007 detects it out of the box but doesn’t install it by default. The reason for this is that PCLinuxOS doesn’t assume to know how you want to install it…either using the built into the kernel support for the broadcom wireless chip or ndiswrapper…which is a program that allows Windows drivers for wireless to be used in Linux. I elected to go with Ndiswrapper since I had some problems with the broadcom driver in PCLinuxOS. Ndiswrapper is installed by default in PCLinuxOS which makes this process even easier…but the process still requires some forethought and I’ll share with you what I did to make this process go smoothly and easily.

Don’t Configure Wireless after Install!

I recommend that you allow first boot to happen without setting up networking at all. I like to do things with a clean slate so I removed my wireless device inside the PCLinuxOS Control Center after first boot. Then I did a full update via wired line and then restarted. Once back inside PCLinuxOS, I used the PCLinuxOS Control Center to remove my wired device (it’s simple enough to re-add it later) and install my wireless device. Please note that I downloaded and extracted the Windows ndiswrapper drivers BEFORE doing this…it’s imperative that you have the drivers in a place you can get to them (windows partition, flash drive, floppy, etc) before you try and configure the device. You can elect to skip over this tip…I just like to simplify what I work with.

Download the Windows Drivers for ndiswrapper Before You Start!

First and foremost…download the drivers from the US Robotics 5411 MaxG page linked to above. It’s going to be in exe format for Windows…sometimes this can be a royal PITA because not all manufacturers create their .exe files the same. Some exe files will allow extractions of files from them while others will not. For example, I downloaded my driver and tried to unzip it:

[root@localhost ~]# cd /home/devnet/Desktop
[root@localhost Desktop]# ls
5411a-2.00.004.exe kvirc.desktop trash.desktop
Home.desktop My Computer.desktop
[root@localhost Desktop]# unzip 5411a-2.00.004.exe
Archive: 5411a-2.00.004.exe
End-of-central-directory signature not found. Either this file is not a zipfile, or it constitutes one disk of a multi-part archive. In the latter case the central directory and zipfile comment will be found on the last disk(s) of this archive. unzip: cannot find zipfile directory in one of 5411a-2.00.004.exe or 5411a-2.00.004.exe.zip, and cannot find 5411a-2.00.004.exe.ZIP, period.
[root@localhost Desktop]#

As you can see…it didn’t work. So what is one to do? You have 2 options here…you can use a Windows PC to extract the files OR use Wine in PCLinuxOS to do it. I chose the first option since I have a Windows PC at work. I downloaded the program 7zip and used it to extract the files from the exe into a single directory. Then I transported over this extracted directory to my PCLinuxOS 2007 /home/devnet folder via a flash drive.

To help others out here though, I’m going to walk through the Wine way of doing things. Now it’s important to note that you need a LAN connection to get this installed…and I know in some instances this won’t be possible…however, you’ll need minimal access to be able to get this going. If you are unable to get internet access on this PC…I’m afraid you won’t be able to get the exe extracted.

How to Use Wine to Extract Wireless Drivers

Connect to a wired line. Click on the Synaptic icon in your toolbar or open up the Synaptic Package Manager by clicking on the Kmenu >> System >> Configuration >> Packaging >> Synaptic Package Manager. Once inside Synaptic, do a search for “Wine”. Once you’ve found it, select it and right click on it. Choose to install it and select “Mark” for the extra packages synaptic asks you to install. Now click the apply and apply again and wait for PCLinuxOS to install things.

After Wine has installed, download and install 7zip linked to above. When you double click the .exe it will ask you what program you’d like to use to open it…type “wine” and click ok. 7zip should install no problems. Now you should see a “Wine” menu appear on your Kmenu. Inside should be 7zip. Run 7zip and extract the .exe. You should end up with a folder on your desktop from the extracted driver. You can now choose to remove wine if you’d like or just leave it in place. I copied the drivers to my /home/devnet directory so I could have access to them and always knew where they were. Plus I like to keep my desktop clear of clutter.

Blacklist the BMC43XX drivers!!

You should blacklist the bcm43xx drivers by default. Remember this is for TR4 or before only…I’m pretty sure Tex and the gang have got this sorted out for final so no worries there…but you should make sure to add “blacklist bcm43xx” to your blacklist. To do this, go to your Kmenu and choose “Run Command”. Enter the command “kdesu kate /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist” and enter your root password when prompted. If asked about a session…choose default session. Now enter “blacklist bcm43xx” inside this file on its own separate line and save. That’s it! Now you shouldn’t get prompted to reinstall drivers each time you open up the network interface in the PCC. What causes this? Well, the PCC is a separate entity from the linux kernel and even the OS iteself. It operates autonomously and therefore doesn’t communicate its intentions nor does the OS or kernel report its intentions. Therefore, they ofen get crossed on some things. By keeping vigilent on things such as blacklisting, you can stay ahead of the curve for using the PCC

Installing with Ndiswrapper

So now we have the drivers ready to install. What next? Well, the PCLinuxOS Control Center never lets you down. If you’ve removed the interface like I did previously, you’ll have to install it again. Go to the PCLinuxOS Control Center and choose Network and Internet >> Set up a New Network Interface. When choosing wireless you’ll be prompted to install drivers using native kernel support (if your card is supported) or ndiswrapper. I’ve found that ndiswrapper works better for this particular card of mine…so I chose ndiswrapper when the time for choice came. I then browsed to the /home/devnet directory and selected the usrmaxg.inf file located inside the extracted directory. After that, I select the general settings for wireless that I desired…for example, open and managed, which is what my connection is. I didn’t input the key yet though…I’ll input the key and SSID with NetApplet later so for now, that’s all I setup.

Setting NetApplet to Start at Boot

To start NetApplet on boot, simply start it up from the Kmenu and then when it runs inside the tray, choose Settings >> Always Launch on Startup. This should make it so NetApplet will start right away for you.

If it still isn’t starting for you, you may need to force it to start anyway. To force Netapplet to start, open up the filemanager with kmenu >> run command >> “konqueror –profile filemanager”. Then I make that window small and push it over to the right side of my screen. I then browse to /home/devnet/.kde/autostart. Then I open up the Kmenu and find Netapplet (should be in System >> Monitoring) and I drag and drop it from the Kmenu into the autostart directory. When it asks if I want to copy, move, or link here…I choose link here. That’s it! Now netapplet will start when you login to your desktop. You can place just about any program in this directory to achieve the same results.

Connecting/Switching Networks

So, now that we’ve got things installed, how do we connect? Right click on NetApplet running in your tray. If it hasn’t started, go back into the Kmenu and start it. Then when it appears in the tray, right click on it and hover over “Wireless Networks”. Choose your network to connect to and enter the Key if prompted. You can switch back and forth between any of the networks that your card picks up and you can do so quite easily with NetApplet.

That’s about it…NetApplet plugs nicely in to PCLinuxOS’s already fantastic Control Center so you should be on your way to operating your wireless connection with ease. One thing I’ve found to be kind of a hassle with PCLinuxOS is that it keeps trying to reconfigure my connection for me. For example, every time I open up the wireless settings portion of the PCLinuxOS Control Center, it prompts me to install drivers even though I’ve already got them installed and running on my system. This is easily cancelled out manually but it is a hassle nonetheless.

All in all, it’s quite nice to have an older laptop hum along with PCLinuxOS and a wireless card. Since I’ve only added wireless to my network in the past year I haven’t ever had the need to do this previously. I hope that this primer serves as a way for all of you to manage your wirless interface with NetApplet…which I’ve found to be the easiest and most friendly way to manage things. If you have any questions or further tips on this subject, please drop me a line in the comments below

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PCLinuxOS 2007, USR5411 MaxG Wireless Primer originally appeared on Yet Another Linux Blog on May 19, 2007.

First, if you’re using KDE press Control-Escape. This will give all processes in a handy window called the KDE System Guard. Clicking the column heading for “System %” so the arrow on it appears facing up will sort the processes from highest system percentage to lowest. Find the process that seems to be hogging up all the resources (or if you know the name of the process, highlight that) and then hit the kill button. Your process should end it’s routines and exit.

You can also check out which program is hogging up your virtual memory with its process which can also slow things up. Clicking on the column “VmSize” and sorting largest to smallest will allow you to see this and select which process to kill. I often elect to select only user processes using the drop down menu at the top right hand corner of the KDE System Guard. Doing this filters out all system files and shows any hanging applications that are initiated by the user (which is often what is hanging for me).

Don’t worry if you see the same process more than once (for example, Apache or php may have multiple entries if you run a webserver…this is normal). If you’re using Gnome, you’ll either have to use the console method I explain below or launch the Gnome System Manager to get things rolling. Since I don’t use Gnome, I won’t cover the Gnome System Manager here.

Another way you can do things…especially if all Xwindows (KDE, Gnome, Fluxbox, etc) have frozen or are sluggish is to drop to a console. You can do this by killing the Xserver or by dropping to a console. You can press Alt-F2 or Alt-F3 and get directly to a console. Login as root. Now let’s take a look and see what processes are hogging up resources. Kill the Xserver and drop to a console by hitting Control-Alt-Backspace. For our purposes, I’ll assume you’ve made it to the console now.

There’s a quick console way of finding exactly what is consuming the most of your PC as far as processes are concerned. Using the the ‘top’ command will display those processes that are beasts and allow you to take note of them. Look for the process taking up the most CPU% (which should appear at the ‘top’ of your ‘top’ output). Pay specific attention to the PID column of that high CPU% item and make a note of it. This is the process ID number and every program running on a Linux box is assigned one by the Kernel. We’ve found the one making problems for us and have recorded the PID so let’s slay it. Hit Control-C to stop the top command and then type:

kill PID

Where PID is the process ID number you made a note of before. You may not get confirmation that the task has been immediately killed so let’s see if it is still running. We may not get the information we need by using top again since it is mainly for finding the higher consuming processes aka runaways. Instead, let’s use the ps command.

ps aux | more

This command outputs all processes in a nice way…using the | and ‘more’ command allows you to paginate the output so that if there are a TON of processes, you can use the spacebar or arrow keys to page down (you can do that with any command too BTW). Now look for that PID that we just killed in the second column and see if it is there. You could also get creative and use:

 ps aux | grep PID

Where PID is once again the PID you killed. The grep command will search through the results and echo back to you any matching entries it finds. If you didn’t find anything and couldn’t match your PID to that of any displayed in your ps aux command, you just successfully killed that beastly process. As always, for more information, please see the man pages (e.g. man ps or man top).

Hopefully, this allows you to more efficiently manage your processes…runaway or normal. If I’ve printed an error, please let me know via the comments below or if there is a more efficient way of doing things let me know there as well…I’m always open to improvement.

UPDATE: Please checkout the comments section for a few more tips on killing processes!

UPDATE2:  Reader Scott M writes in the comments below “You don’t have to use the PID. You can use the -f option.  e.g. if there are multiple instance of SomeProgram, you can kill them all with one command:

pkill -9 -f SomeProgram”  Thanks Scott!

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Dealing with Runaway Processes originally appeared on Yet Another Linux Blog on March 12, 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.