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5. Configuring your desktop

Maybe you do not like the way the desktop looks like. KDE is very configurable and you can change almost every aspect of the appearance and the handling of your desktop. You do this with the Control Center, a special program for configuring your desktop. Launch the Control Center from the "Go!" menu. On the left half, you can see a list of so-called modules. Every module allows you to configure a certain aspect of you desktop. Currently, there are modules for "Desktop", "Sound System", "Input Devices", "System Information" and "Network". Others may appear in the future. On the right half, an introduction screen with some information about your computer is shown. This is also the area, where the modules show their output. You open a module by either single-clicking on the "plus" sign next to the module or double-clicking on the folder icon. Most modules have several sub-pages.

We will now discuss the various modules and what you can do with them.

5.1 The module "Desktop"

In this module, you configure the appearance, like the color, the icons that KDE puts around your application windows and several other things. Let's start with changing the background. Double-click on the colorful "Background" icon, and in the right half of control center, a form for the background settings appears.

Configuring the background

The most prominent part of this form is the large monitor in the middle where you can see a preview how your entries affect the look of the desktop. Left and right to it are two buttons with arrows. You already know that you can distribute your windows over several desktops. In KDE, you can configure every desktop separately. Simply choose the desktop you want to configure by clicking on the icons for browsing forward and backward through the desktops. You can also change the names of the desktops here by editing the entry field that shows the name of the currently selected desktop (other ways to change the names are clicking on the corresponding desktop button on the panel or choosing Go!->Panel->Configure->Desktops).

There two style options for your background: You can either use a color (solid or gradient) or a background image (a so-called wallpaper). Let's start by saying that we want to have a nice solid pink in our background. Press on the button in the color area. A color selector appears where you can choose a color (or even mix your own if you are so inclined). For now, just pick pink (or whatever you like) and press OK. The color selector disappears and you can see that the button in the color area you clicked on is now pink. Also, the monitor above has turned pink since it gives you a preview how your desktop will look like after applying the changes you have just made. You could now make these changes permanent by clicking the OK button, but perhaps you might want to get an impression first how your desktop will look like. Simply hit the Apply button and the background will turn pink (or whatever you chose). If you have many open windows on your desktop, you might not see a bit of the background. Iconify or close some windows and you can see it again.

If you think that a single color is too boring, what about a gradient instead? Click on the gradient button, and a second color button will show up. Here, you can choose the second color which is the other endpoint of the gradient. Experiment with the two colors. You can always check the results in the monitor or click on the Apply button if you want to see your changes "live".

Is this still not enough for you? Well you can always plaster a wallpaper on your desktop. KDE comes with three stylish wallpapers (Ocean, Paper and Water), but you can just as easily choose a graphics file of your own as long as it is in the JPEG format (you can use kview for graphics format conversion). Either pick one of the preconfigured wallpapers from the list (your system administrator might even have provided more wallpapers here), or click on the "Browse..." button. A file selector box will pop up where you can choose your file. If the graphics you want to use, is not big enough to fill the entire desktop, the three buttons to the left of the "Browse..." button come to the rescue. If you choose "Centered", the graphics is left as is and simply placed in its original size in the center of the desktop. "Scaled" means of course scaling the graphics so that it fills the entire screen. Notice that that could result in poor quality, depending on the type of the graphics. Finally, "Tiled" means that the graphics as copied and the copies are just to "tile" the whole desktop.

Defining widget colors

Let's continue with the color configuration which you can find in the colors submenu of the "Desktop" module in kcc. Unlike in the last section where we configured the color of the background, we configure here the colour of the contents and the decorations of windows.

KDE uses a well-known concept called "Color Schemes". These are sets of colors that look good together. A color scheme in KDE consists of seven colors: one for the titlebar background when the titlebar is inactive, one for the titlebar background when the titlebar is inactive, a color for the titlebar background and text when the titlebar is active, and two each for the background and the text for the window background, normal background and selected background. If this sounds confusing for you we would suggest that you simply try some of the color schemes. As with the background, you can see in the top half what the desktop will look like with a certain color scheme. You can either simply pick one of the preconfigured color schemes from the list or roll your own. For this, simply choose one of the ten colors from the option menu "Widget color" and select the color by clicking on the button below the option menu and choosing a color in the appearing color selector. See how your changes are reflected in the preview window. If you have found a combination that looks especially nice to you, you might want to save it. To do this, simply click on the "Save" button and choose a filename. If you get tired of one of your own color schemes you can also remove it with the "Remove" button, but you can never remove any of the preconfigured color schemes.

If you have laptop, you might want to increase the contrast of the colors, but do not want to go through the trouble of handpicking the colors. The "Contrast" slider helps you out here; move it and see what happens.

As with the Background dialog, you can also see your color schemes "live" by clicking on the "Apply" button. See how the windows flicker a bit and then change their colors online, without you having to restart the applications before the changes are visible. This has never been seen before on Unix platforms. There's one caveat, though: Only KDE applications (i.e. applications especially written for KDE or other applications turned into a KDE application) can have their colors configured via the Control Center. We hope that someday all major applications will have been turned into a KDE application, but until then you will have to contend yourself with these applications only having their titlebars changed.

Choosing a screensaver

If the same image is shown for too long on a cathode-ray tube, the image "burns into" the phosphor coating of tube and can be seen as a shadow image afterwards. In this case, you can effectively consider your monitor broken (this does not apply to LCD display which generate their images completely differently). In order to avoid this, screensavers have been invented. A screensaver is a little program that lurks in the background and springs into action when you have not made any inputs to the computer for a certain time (because in most cases this also means, the same image can be seen for the same time). Most screensavers display some colorful moving image. Of course, KDE has screensavers, too. The screensaver dialog of the "Desktop" module allows you to choose and configure your screensaver of choice. You can see the now familiar monitor in the top half of the dialog where a preview of the currently selected screensaver is shown. You can pick a screensaver from the list of choices (KDE comes with no less than fifteen screensavers!), and the monitor will show it. If you want to see the screensaver in full size, you can click on the "Test" button. Since most screensavers have additional configuration parameters, always try and click on the "Setup..." button to see which configuration options a chosen screensaver has.

In the "Settings" area, you can choose how long the screensaver should lurk in the background. If choose too long a time, the screensaver does not protect your screen, and if you choose a time that is too small, it can be enerving. The default of ten minutes is probably a good choice.

If you do not want to let others see what is on your screen when you leave your computer, you can turn on the "Requires password". In this case, it is not enough to hit a key or move the mouse to turn of a screensaver, you will also be asked to enter your password. If you do not want to wait for the screensaver to appear before your work is concealed from other peoples' eyes, you can also click on the button with the small padlock on it on the panel.

The entry field "Priority" determines how much time the operating system should allocate for the screensaver. Unless you have background tasks running while the screensaver is on, you can probably leave this on "High".

Picking a style

Picking a style means choosing two things: a style for the widgets, i.e. everything you see on the screen (you can either choose a Windows 95-like style or a Motif-like style) and a font for the applications. Like the color schemes, these settings only apply to KDE applications. If you want to preview your choice, you can click on the "Apply" button, just like in the other dialogs.

Configuring the titlebar

As you have already learned, the titlebar provides you not only with the name of the application and optionally a document name, but also with up to five buttons with which you can manipulate the windows.

Let's start with the buttons. For each of the five buttons (Minimize, Maximize, Sticky, Close and Menu), you can choose whether it should be shown to the left of the titlebar, to the right, or not at all. We would suggest that you leave all buttons in at the beginning because they give you quick and easy access to the window manipulation functions.

On the second page of the titlebar dialog which you reach by clicking on the "Appearance" tab, you can choose how your titlebar itself should look like. There are two things to configure: If your titlebar should be shaded and how fast and if the text in it should be animated. You can easily find out what the "Shaded" and "Plain" settings are really for by changing them, clicking on the "Apply" button and observe the titlebar. The titlebar animation is not so obvious. The titlebar is only animated when the text in it is too long to fit into the titlebar. All other desktop and window systems leave you with an incomplete text here, but KDE makes a difference. The titlebar animation simply scrolls the text back and forth so that you have the possibility to read every single bit of it. With the slider, you can change the speed of this animation (choosing too high a value will probably make your head feel dizzy after a while), or even turn the animation off by setting the slider to 0.

Manipulating window properties

In the last dialog of the "Desktop" module, you can choose how KDE should manipulate your windows. If "Window movement" is set to "transparent", you can see what is below a window while dragging it to a new location. If it is "opaque", the whole window contents is moved.

Resize Animation is a unobtrusive animation that is shown when iconify or deiconify a window. It's just for the look, and it is up to you to decide whether to turn it off. On slow machines, turning the animation off is probably the better idea.

The "Focus Policy" is a very important setting, because it very much controls how you work with the desktop. Only one window at a time can "have the focus", and you can only enter text (or ue the keyboard at all) in the window that has the focus. If you choose "Focus follows mouse", the window below the mouse pointer gets the focus. This is also called implicit focus change. If you on the other hand set the focus policy to "Click to focus", you explicitly have to click into a window in order to give this window focus. As you may have guessed, this is also known as explicit focus change.

If you have chosen "Click to focus", the focussed window is always raised to the top of all windows. But if you have chosen "Focus follows mouse", it can be the case that an almost completely obscured window has got the focus (if the is at least a tiny visible piece of it and the mouse pointer is positioned over that piece). Since some people consider this inconvenient, you can turn on auto-raising by choosing a value with the slider. If a partially obscured window gets the focus and keeps it for the time chosen with the slider, it is raised automatically to the top. By choosing a delay of zero seconds, you turn of auto-raising. Notice that it is probably a bad idea to choose a very small (non-null) value for the auto-raising delay, since you will have a lot of window raising on your desktop when moving the mouse.

The setting "Maximize style" determines what the maximize button (and the maximize menu item in the window menu) does. You can either have it maximize the window in both dimensions, or leave the width as it is and only maximize the height. Notice that the desktop will never obscure the panel or the taskbar when maximizing &; a very convenient feature! Notice also that you can always get the other choice by using the middle mouse button, e.g. if you have chosen "Maximize vertically", you can still maximize a window fully by clicking on the maximize button with the middle mouse button.

5.2 The "Sound System" module

Currently, the Sound System module contains only one dialog where you can configure the sound of the system bell that normally notifies you about non-standard conditions like errors. Notice that this will not work on all systems; please consult your hardware and OS documentation if you experience any problems.

5.3 The "Input Device" module

This module allows you to configure your keyboard and your mouse. For the keyboard, you can configure the repeat rate and an optional key click (might not work on all machines), for the mouse, you can choose how fast it should move and whether the left and right buttons should change meanings (this is convenient if you have the mouse to the left of your keyboard).

5.4 The "System Information" module

This module gives you some information about the processor and the memory you have in your machine. While this may be interesting for some of you, you do not need to know what is said here; also there is nothing you could change here.

5.5 The "Sample Group" module

If you simply try to get your work done, you will probably open this module. But if you try everything you see on the screen just out of curiosity, you will probably disappointed about this module: It is plain empty. It is meant as demonstration, and if you are a programmer or systems administrator, you can use this module to learn how to write your own modules for the Control Center.

5.6 The "Network" module

This module currently only contains one dialog for the Samba Network Status. Since you need to know quite a lot about Samba to make sense of the information provided here (and if you do not know what Samba is, you probably do not need it), we will not discuss this further.


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