In this article you will learn how to configure options for both a window and a specific application.

Where are the configurations?

Figure 1

You won’t find these settings in the System Settings window. You find them in a special menu that appears when you right-click the title bar of a window or application (see Figure 1). The menu entries are in the Advanced menu.

There are two menu entries in particular:

Special Window Settings: Configure window attributes.

Special Application Settings: Configure application attributes.

There is very little difference between the two.  If you compare the two different settings, side by side, for the same application, you will find in just about every case, all available options are the same. The difference will be how each is configured.  To make this easier, we will take a look at the Special Application Settings configuration. For the purposes of this article, we will examine the settings for the application konsole (the KDE console tool).

Figure 2

When you open up the Special Applications Settings you will see five tabs (see Figure 2):

• Windows: Description, class, and role of the window defines the window (or application) you are affecting.
• Window Extra: Window types, title, extra roles.
• Geometry: Position, size, maximized (either/or horizontally or vertically), fullscreen, desktop, etc.
• Preferences: Various preferences such as skip taskbar, autogroup, keep above/below, etc.
• Workarounds: Stealing prevention, moving resizing, minimized size, etc.

When you poke around this window you will find a ton of possible options. The easiest way to describe how this works is by example.

Kiosk mode

Let’s say you use a Linux machine in a kiosk where you want the Linux box to serve as nothing more than a web browser. You don’t want the users to be able to get their fingers on any other applications and you don’t want the browser to be able to be closed. You can do this with the help of this tool. For such a set up you would want to configure the following:

Geometry: Select Full Screen and, from the drop down, select Force (make sure you tick the force check boxe as well)

Preferences: Select Skip Taskbar and, from the drop down, select Force (make sure you tick the force check boxe as well) . Select No Border and, from the drop down, select Force (make sure you tick the force check boxe as well).

Figure 3

The next time you open that application (in this case Firefox) you will have a full screen browser with no way to close or get to other applications (see Figure 3).

But how can you close the browser? Easy. Click <Alt>F3 to get the right-click menu back and select Close. Or you can re-configure the Special Application Settings.

Final thoughts

These fine-grain configurations make KDE (and KWin) an outstanding desktop that is flexible and highly configurable. Play around with these settings until you get the perfect desktop. If you create something cool, share it with your fellow Ghacks readers.

Today’s upgrade may have changed my mind all together about this particular desktop. KDE now enjoys a very similar feel it had with 3.5. It’s solid, reliable, beautiful, and user-friendly. But is it enough to make you want to use it? Let’s first install it and then poke around a bit.

Installation

I am running KDE on a Ubuntu 9.10 install. The upgrade for KDE 4.3.5 is very simple if you follow these steps:

Open up a terminal window.

1. Issue the command sudo /etc/apt/sources.list.
2. Enter your password.
3. Uncomment out the line deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ karmic-backports main restricted universe multiverse.
4. Issue the command sudo apt-get update.
5. Open up your update manager.
6. Check for updates.
7. Install the updates.
8. Close all running applications.
9. Log out of your desktop.
10. Log back into, making sure you choose KDE as your desktop.

Figure 1

You should now be running KDE 4.3.5. You can check by opening up the Dolphin file manager and click the Help > About KDE. You should see KDE 4.3.5 as shown in Figure 1.

Once you have verified that the update was successful, play around for a bit. What is the first thing you notice? For me it was that everything seemed to really feel stable and much, much speedier. Prior to this update KDE still seemed a bit unsure of what it was going to do next and it felt sluggish, even on a fairly modern, dual-core machine.  That seems to be a thing of the past.

What is new

What should surprise you the most is how few updates KDE 4.3.5 brought to the table. If you read the full changelog you will find 25 bugs were squashed. That’s not many. So either KDE has obfuscated the rest of the bug listings or the bugs they resolved were fairly serious in nature.

It also seems the Compiz support is getting better and better with each release. Although Compiz is not nearly as fully realized in KDE as it is in GNOME, it is getting to the point where KDE and Compiz play well together.

Should you use it?

Figure 2

Without a doubt, if you are a KDE user,  this is a must-have update. If you are running any version of KDE 4 earlier than 4.3.5 you owe it to yourself to upgrade. And if you’re not currently a KDE users, now is a good time to give this desktop a try. Why? With the latest release of KDE comes a desktop that might well win you over from GNOME or any other desktop.

And if you’re unsure, give Figure 2 a look and see what you are missing. What you see here is the coverflow-like application switcher default in KDE 4.3.5.

What does the future hold?

The most exciting prospect of KDE 4.4 is the social desktop and the netbook Plasma. The social desktop will bring your social network to widgets on your Plasma desktop. And the netbook Plasma will offer a much more modern desktop to those adorable little mini-laptops.

The only problem you will find is that some of the many distributions do not ship with KDE installed. If you want KDE on these distributions you must install it. In this article I am going to walk you through the steps for installing the latest KDE on a Ubuntu system. Now you may be saying to yourself: “Why don’t I just install Kubuntu and be done with it? That’s a good question. The answer? Most new users have no idea that Kubuntu even exists and will have already installed the GNOME-based Ubuntu. For those people who already have their Linux running, they might want to give the KDE desktop a try as well. That is where tutorials like this come in handy. And of course, once we get KDE installed, we will also take it one step further and install support for Compiz so you can have your 3D effects just like you can on GNOME.

Installation

Unfortunately you can’t just open up the Ubuntu Software Center, do a search for KDE, and install. You will have to add repositories to you /etc/apt/sources.list file before you can run the installation command. Fortunately, this is as simple as issuing a few commands.

The first two commands you need to issue will add the proper repositories to your sources.list file. With the help of these commands you will not need to open that file up in an editor, as they will simply add the necessary lines for you. So open up a terminal window and issue these two commands (NOTE: Each command is one line long so just copy and paste each command, one at a time, into your terminal. After you copy one command hit enter and then copy paste the next command.):

sudo sh -c "echo 'deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-ppa/backports/ubuntu jaunty main' >> /etc/apt/sources.list"

and:

sudo sh -c "echo 'deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-ppa/staging/ubuntu jaunty main' >> /etc/apt/sources.list"

Now that you have the necessary lines you will need to add the correct GPG key with this command:

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 8AC93F7A

Finally, for the installation, issue the command:

sudo aptitude install kubuntu-desktop

This will require a fairly hefty download, so give this some time. During the installation you will have to do one bit of configuration which is to choose your graphical login manager. I would suggest sticking with the GNOME login manager GDM.

Compiz support

Now it’s time to build in some Compiz support. You will find, after you install KDE that, no matter how you configure it, KDE will not work with Compiz – even if Compiz is working perfectly with GNOME. That is because you have to add KDE Compiz support. To do this issue the command:

sudo apt-get install compiz-kde

Once that installation has completed you will then need to open the Compiz Configuration Settings Manager (use the command ccsm) and then, under the General category, check the KDE Compatibility check box. You should now be good to go with both KDE and Compiz.

Final thoughts

Do not judge KDE 4.x on previous releases. You owe it to yourself and to the developers of KDE to give the 4.3 release a try. Once you do I think you will see it has matured quite a bit over the last year. And now, with the help of this tutorial, you can do just that.

The desktop manager provides several methods of accessing the parts of the desktop that are not visual. It displays a slider in the upper right corner of the screen that can be used to access another part of the desktop. The second and probably most comfortable solution is to use the mouse-wheel while clicking the left or middle mouse button to scroll left or right. The third and final option is to open the quick nav bar by clicking on the slider and use the navigation bar to access another part of the desktop directly. The desktop scrolls seamlessly by connecting the end and beginning together.

By default only the Windows Taskbar stays in place all the time to provide access to its functions. All other windows and applications will remain in place which means that some of them will not be accessible when in the wrong part of the computer desktop.

This can be changed in the options of the 360 desktop manager so that applications will always be in the visible area of the computer screen. New desktop layouts can be downloaded or created at the official 360 Desktop website. Downloaded desktops can be loaded directly in the application or by dragging and dropping them afterwards in the 360 Manager.

It is furthermore possible to manage so called widgets in the 360 Manager which can only be created on the 360 Desktop website by registered users. Widgets can be pretty much any element that is available on a website like video clips, eBay listings or RSS news feeds which will always be displayed when the desktop manager starts.

Another feature is the ability to display the desktop icons if windows or applications hide them. The hotkey CTRL Q displays the hidden desktop icons and the user can interact with them normally.

One click hides the text of the files and icons and another the complete icons which might be nice if you want to take a screenshot of your desktop for instance.

The last function is not that practicable in the daily work routine but I could think of some applications for it. It is possible to arrange the desktop icons in certain forms, like hearts, stars or triangles. Create a heart for your loved one for instance but be prepared to undo the changes as well.

It is possible to minimize or maximize all open windows at once and place windows in the system tray. I was not able to find out all of the functions because of a missing help file. If you right-click and hold shift while clicking on minimize you put the window into the system tray instead of the task bar for instance. If you have more information please let me know.

The about information states that you have to move the mouse over the titlebar, the maximize, minimize and close functions to get help but this is not working for me. Maybe because I disabled something in Windows, who knows ?