A bunch of KDE questions

[Brian Kendig]

I have a whole bunch of questions about KDE (3.1, which I'm running on 
Debian Linux):

- My fonts in the KDE 3.1 Konsole are screwed up.  I go into Settings / 
Font / Custom, and no matter what font I select, like say 
Lucidatypewriter, it always shows up in the 'Quick Brown Fox' sample 
area below as the same spaced-out-all-weird Helvetica (like the 
software is trying to display proportional characters as monospaced).  
If I hit 'OK' then the Konsole font takes on the same weirdly-spaced 
Helvetica.  Only if I select Settings / Font / Normal (or Tiny or Huge 
or any of the other presets) will it give me a normal-looking font, 
which looks like Courier.  Why are the fonts acting so wonky here?

- I managed to get audio working, but my system bell isn't dinging any 
more.  I go into the Control Center, under System Bell, and no matter 
what I set the sliders to, and whether or not I have 'Use system bell 
instead of system notification' checked, it never makes any noise.  
Other event sound effects work fine under KDE; how do I re-enable the 
bell?

- How do I install a new KDE theme?  'KAlloy' from themes.kde.org looks 
neat, but it wants me to install it by specifying the 'prefix' and 
'libdir' directories.  I've figured out what 'libdir' is, but what's 
'prefix' supposed to be?  I don't know what it means by 'the path of my 
kde installation' -- kde3 is in /usr/bin, but I don't think there's a 
central location for the rest of the kde files, is there?

- themes.kde.org only has ten KDE 3.1 themes, and themes.org only has 
thirteen of them!  Are there lots more KDE themes hiding someplace 
else, or does no one use non-standard themes?  Which theme do you use?

- Is there a graphical battery monitor that I can put in the KDE panel 
beside the clock?  I haven't been able to find a battery monitor yet.

- Is there a central directory for KDE applications, similar to 
'/Applications' on the Mac or 'C:\Program Files' on Windows?  Or do I 
have to keep all the KDE apps in the 'Start' menu (or whatever the 
K-gear menu is called)?

- My laptop seems really sluggish when it's running KDE.  Like, for 
example, the 1024x768 login screen backdrop takes so long to load that 
I've already logged in by the time it appears.  Admittedly, this is a 
P3/266, but my iBook/300 feels faster running Mac OS X even despite all 
the Mac's flashy graphic bells&whistles.  What are some ways to get the 
lead out of KDE?

- In your opinion, what are the must-have applications for KDE?

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