Tips for Plasma in 4.1

neverendingo

Trainee

Posts: 94

Thursday, July 24th 2008, 7:40pm

Tips for Plasma in 4.1

This will become a collection of some tips around the new plasma desktop. Feel free to tell me if you think there's something missing.

Containments

If you zoom out your desktop you have the possibility to add a new "activity", or better a desktop containment (the word activity is better, you will see). Zooming in again you can switch between these activities with Ctrl+Shift+p or Ctrl+Shift+n (previous and next). Now you can add whatever plasmoid you want. Note though that in every activity you can add different plasmoids. And that's the point. You can even have different wallpapers on them. Suppose you have one activity, where you want some picture frames from your family and a plasmoid with your favourite garfield comic. And maybe a note plasmoid with your shopping list.
Now you can have another activity with maybe a newsticker, the calculator and the folderview linked to your favourite files.

Folderview

There are so many possibilities with this applet, i'm sure i will miss some of them.
At first, sure, you can let it show your desktop, just like the old desktop. Only that it is limited to the size of the plasmoid itself. But you can also link it to every file you want, no matter where they are, local or remote. Whatever ioslave kde has, folderview can use it. Together with the filter there are WAY to many possibilities.
But some nifty things: if you drag a picture out of the folderview to the desktop, you can automatically add a pictureframe with that picture you dragged.
Or, you have 2 folderviews with different locations, maybe one local and the other remote. Now drag a file from one to the other plasmoid. Why use a file manager?

Icons

Much too often discussed... but some things i discovered. Simply drag an icon from the menu to the desktop or the panel. There you have your old icons.

More to follow soon

This post has been edited 1 times, last edit by "neverendingo" (Jul 24th 2008, 9:48pm)

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susegebr

Beginner

Posts: 55

Location: Willemstad Curacao

Occupation: Pensionado

Saturday, July 26th 2008, 12:06am

Tips for Plasma in 4.1

Running on Xgl instead of normal Xorg 3 new activitys are made but in order to delete them you have to restart the X.
then when you right click on a activity you get a roldown menu with delete this desktop.
then you have to restart X to delete the other ones.

When from the original desktop programs start slow they appear on the desktop of the activity they emergne on manely because the hole screen is the desk top on wich they normaly run a bug may be??

To handle this in a save way without much problems whe needs something like the desktop widget but then for switching those activity-desktops which sits on the panel

To add a activity and all the handling with it that schould be in Personal Settings

That done then the righthand top corner thing can disappear see handling in Personal Settings

And as the Personel Setting appear in the form of KDE3 then it is a desktop
and not a bunch of LEGO stones take a color for that param take that color for the desktop etc etc

PS.

All what is in Autostart and what was running at the moment you make 1 or several activity's each and every activity inherits
those programs but only on the 1e desktop of that activity.
So Autostart has to be altered so you can say only on that activity or several or all.
The programs running on ?e ativity 2e desktop may only start after reboot or restart kde4 on the that activity/desktop where it was started

otherwise you get a hell off a mess when you leave programs running in desktops in activity's en schutdown the computer
after reboot all the programs start in the default normal desktop.

In my test i had Gkrellm running and via autostart severall screenlets

This post has been edited 2 times, last edit by "susegebr" (Jul 26th 2008, 9:45pm)

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susegebr

Beginner

Posts: 55

Location: Willemstad Curacao

Occupation: Pensionado

Monday, July 28th 2008, 11:37pm

The screen resolution

If you have a monitor or flatpanel with a resolution greater 1024 x 768

check this "Appearance - System-Settings - Fonts
Force fonts DPI set this to 96

Now you see the normal resolution of your monitor/flatpanel
If Firefox has to large fonts just <Ctrl> and - to get it less <Ctrl> and + to get it larger

This post has been edited 1 times, last edit by "susegebr" (Jul 28th 2008, 11:55pm)

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lmcogs

Beginner

Posts: 1

Friday, September 12th 2008, 11:42pm

howto get rid of config popup next to destop icons kde 4.1

How can I stop the annoying config side bar that pops up when mouse is over the icons on the desktop in kde 4.1. Also not keen on the add widget icon top corner and on the menu bar. Apart from that kde 4.1 is working very well fedora 9 and I'm liking it v much. [KDE]