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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