[kde-linux] kde4 help

[Kevin Krammer]

On Sunday 16 December 2007, Paul Kaplan wrote:
> A few questions about kde4 (rc2)
>
> Is there any documentation?  The help menu seems to bring me to the 3.5
> doc.
>
> Where does one configure the panel (plasma?)?  What about other aspects of
> the wm?  The default config takes up too much screen real estate and I'd
> still like to move some desktop widgets to some kind of system tray.  Does
> the panel autohide?  Can you make multiple panels?

As far as I know (i.e. haven't followed Plasma related development closely):
- the RC2 panel isn't configurable yet

- I think it is possible to access window manager configuration through the 
decoration context menu and through system settings (i.e. the new control 
center)

- currently the only way to get plasmoids onto a panel is directly dragging 
them from the "add applet" dialog to the panel. However, relocating (e.g. 
moving from panel to desktop or vice versa) is one of the core concepts if 
the Plasma and will probably be available soon.

- Panels are applets themselves, so I don't see any technical restriction why 
there couldn't be more than one or have them do active things. I agree that 
it is quite unfortunate that they only got attention lately, but I guess 
there had been the need to finish some internal stuff first.

> Can you put icons on the Desktop?  It seems like a lot of unused space.

There is a "Desktop" applet which will show the contents of ~/Desktop and I 
think application launcher icons can directly be dragged from the menu to the 
desktop.

> What's with the widgets?  The default is huge.  Can they be resized
> (smaller)? What about alternative bitmaps?  Are there widget repositories
> yet?

When one hovers the mouse over a widget, it has some handles on its border, 
one of them allowing scaling and rotation.
Currently all widgets are part of the KDE source repository (various modules) 
my guess is that there will be a special section for them on kde-apps.org 
once the dust has settled, i.e. KDE becoming actually available through 
non-experimental distribution sources.

Cheers,
Kevin

-- 
Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer
KDE user support, developer mentoring
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