Please help me solve these problems in Kubuntu
Santanu Chatterjee
thisissantanu at gmail.com
Tue May 10 13:33:47 UTC 2005
Hi everybody,
I am normally a GNOME user. But with every new KDE release, I try it
out for some days, and after a week or so, when the fun is over, I
tend to get back to GNOME. But this time, with KDE 3.4 under Kubuntu
5.04, the story is different. I kind of stuck to KDE. For the first
time, I actually find it beautiful (the Plastic/Lipstic theme is very
nice IMO). But more importantly, arts is yet to crash on me and spoil
the fun (my past experiences with arts has been pathetic to say the
least), and Konqueror opens yahoo mail page perfectly (though it still
can't seem to open the full featured gmail page, but I believe that
will change soon). Besides, amarok is amazing, orders of magnitude
better compared to rythmbox.
However, now that I have decided to stick around for sometime more, I
feel I should find a way to do the following, which I can't seem to be
able to do myself.
Here goes:
o How to add paths to various programs for kde to find them? using
'export PATH=...' in ~/.bashrc apparently does not work.
o I have some VCDs copied to my HDD as bin and cue files. Mplayer can
play them, but kaffeine cannot seem to recognize them. Is there any
way to get it to play them without converting them to mpeg format?
o This one is not a KDE specific problem. But I am quite fed up with
seeing my favorite distros lacking mp3 and mpeg support out of the
box. I am using mp32ogg to convert all my mp3 files to ogg
format. Is there any similar program available for converting my
mpeg/bin files to theora format?
o Is there any shortcut in KDE to access the kde-panel, like in GNOME
(where I can use Ctrl+Alt+Tab to switch between the Desktop and the
panels)? I want this feature mainly to use a shortcut to access the
'System' menu in the panel (as found in Kubuntu 5.04).
o How to get the KSysGuard applet to actually show me the CPU load? I
have tried several times but failed to get the thing to display
anything. The GNOME counterpart just works. Do I have to learn how
ssh works just to get this going? Also, IIRC, in previous KDE
releases, I did not face this problem (I am not sure whether the applet
concerned was KSysGuard or something else)
o Several months back, when I tried KDE, I remember that if I tried to
give some custom shortcut that clashed with an already given
shortcut, KDE would tell me about it, but IIRC, also allowed to use
that shortcut, and when I used the shortcut, it would open up a menu
allowing me to choose from all the items that had the same keyboard
shortcut given. But KDE 3.4 seems to provide no such feature, and
worse, it also does not tell me when I try to give an already used
keyboard shortcut to another application. Is there any way to
activate the former feature? (I am not talking about the multikey
shortcuts) Oh, by the way, talking of multikey shortcuts, is there
a way to give Emacs like shortcuts (e.g. <Ctrl-a, Win-c>, etc).
So far, I could only manage shortcuts like <Ctrl-a,c>
o Suppose I am using a KDE application. There are several widgets (I
guess I am using the term right), and I can select different widgets
just by pressing 'Tab' key repeatedly. So far so good. But suppose
that I am now in a widget that has several links (say 10 or so) in
it. Now if I want to move to the next widget, I am having to press
10 Tabs now to get there. Is there a way to bypass 'Tabbing' through
the links and get to the next widget quickly? As you can well
understand, I am mainly a keyboard person, and I tend to reach out
for the mouse as little as possible. So, I would be very glad if
someone could suggest a solution to this. (I find this to be a
problem in GNOME as well, by the way.)
o Suppose in 'media:/' I mount my USB PenDrive (i.e. click on it), do
some work, and then decide to 'unmount' it, not 'safely remove
it'. How do I do that from konqueror? (If I 'safely remove it', I
will again have to plug it out and plug back in to get it detected
by konqueror)
o Also, is there any general method (no, not through Qt/KDE
programming) to add my own items to the 'Actions' menu associated
with certain file types? I am asking this since KDE's Ark can't seem
to be able to open iso images like File Roller in GNOME. But it is
easy to write a script, which, if I can put in the 'Actions' menu
for the iso image files, I can easily view them without loop
mounting the iso image myself.
o Is there any way to access the 'Navigation Panel' in a Konqueror
window through some keyboard shortcut? (F9 is used to show or hide
it, but I cannot seem to access it from the keyboard)
That's all I care to know right now. GNOME is basically boring, great
for everyday work. KDE is anything but boring... lots of tips and
tricks to learn and quite a challenge to use it to its _full_ potential
(just discovered the power of kdcop. Still exploring this thing :)
If you are still with me, thanks for reading this looong mail. I would
really appreciate if anyone could provide solutions to the above
mentioned problems I am facing, or point me to suitable documents.
Regards,
Santanu
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