Well recently I’d bought an external 750GB USB hard disk, as I was running out of space on my laptop. Now this drive requires an external power source, so I just cant lug it everywhere with my laptop in my room so I thought I’ll connect this to my other laptop, and share the drive (the other laptop is my office one, runs on Windows) and I could access this drive over WiFi. While accessing the drive contents via Dolphin was pretty easy thanks to the smb kparts (ie, to access just type smb://<ip-address>/<share-name> oh btw this works in Gnome 2.23 as well) trying to access the drive in Amarok via smb kparts would result in Amarok crashing. Hence I decided to mount it. I was sorta stuck, as I read the man pages for mount which mentioned smbfs is available but then mount kept throwing ‘unknown filesystem type smbfs”.

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The holidays are upon us ‘t is the season to be jolly, and Wade Olson has come up with some amazing Christmas wallpapers with a distinct KDE flavour.

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PeerGuardian 2, is an awesome IP filtering software. Though its FOSS, it there isn’t a Linux port of it yet. But don’t worry, if you’re using KTorrent, you can make use of PeerGuardian’s filters.  Let me show how you can do so.

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Couple of days ago, while I was updating the KDE4.0.4 install present on my openSUSE, my Internet conked off(as usual), and I was stuck halfway between the KDE4.0.4 -> KDE 4.1.3 update. So I shutdown my system. Later on while powering it on, this semi-update badly damaged by KDE installation with version incompatibilities and DBUS communication failures – resulting that my X server wouldn’t come up, with KDE chosen as the DE. With KDE out, I was trying to figure out how to get it updated, without any GUI tools(generally I rely on YaST2) and then I thought why not try out zypper

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Consider this situation. You have multiple programs installed for a particular file type. Now double clicking it opens an application, but you want it to open in another application.

For example, you want your images to open in showFoto instead of Gwenview, so how do you go about doing this? Let me show you how to do so!

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The release KDE4 brought in the new kickoff menu, the slab-style menu which was first introduced in openSUSE 10.2. The premise is simple – instead of unfolding menu after menu, the submenu opens within the menu itself. What makes the Kickoff a killer is the inclusion of search.

While I love Kickoff menu and can’t live without it, lot many people prefer the old KDE style menu.

So lets see how to get the old traditional K Menu back – it’s simple, no editing of config files required!

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Plasmoids are the little widgets that have made an appearance with KDE4. Plasmoids can basically do anything – from displaying your desktop and associated wallpaper to showing your laptop’s battery level,or even display the latest comics or post a tweet to twitter. While KDE 4 comes with some plasmoids, you can add extra plasmoids which do other things – from displaying your current system status to showing your current GPU temperature. Lets see how to do so.

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It’s no secret that KDE4.0 didn’t get good reviews. Fact is it was heavily criticized, mainly for instability problems. So much so that it was argued that KDE 4.0 shouldn’t have been pushed out as a .0 release. But that was past, and today KDE 4.1 was released. Judging from the reactions, its no doubt that the KDE team has almos redeemed its mistakes of the 4.0 release.

Linux.com carries a review of KDE4.1, and here’s what they say

One of the most controversial announcements during the KDE 4.1 development cycle was the reported removal of icons for the desktop. In actuality, desktop icons are not missing from the new version, they’re just handled differently. This version introduces a Folder View plasmoid, which is a container you can place on the desktop that can show the contents of any directory.

As far as eye candy, KDE 4.1 looks simply stunning. While its theme uses the same foundation as 4.0, the developers have improved it with many tweaks.

Some of the most notable new features in KDE 4.1 include the introduction of the minimalistic Dragon Player for videos, tree view and tabbed browsing features in Dolphin, and several improvements in Gwenview, such as a thumbnail bar and the repositioning of the rotate and full screen options to easier to reach places to minimize mouse movement.

TuxMachines has a collection of reviews of  KDE4.1, you might want to check it out.

For those who want to try KDE4.1, openSUSE KDE4.1 Live CD is available, download it from here.
If you’re already using openSUSE 11, upgrade to KDE4.1 using the 1-click installer.

KDE 4.1 Alpha 1 was just released, and it looks very promising indeed! Here’s what bastion of PolishLinux had to say:

Desktop

First thing worth noticing is the new looks of KRunner. Unfortunately, on the current stage, it behaves in an unpredictable manner. In some cases after typing one letter I had to wait a few seconds for KRunner to catch it and prompt me with a list of available choices. What is more, it randomly hung up completely, exceeding the maximum response time, forcing KWin to kindly ask me to kill it.

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Consider this situation. You want to know much space is available on your hard disk. No big deal, du can tell you the stats. For this open the terminal and type du -h. You will get the required details as below

sathya@shaman:~$ du -h /home/sathya/Downloads
35M     /home/sathya/Downloads/kubuntu debs
177M    /home/sathya/Downloads
sathya@shaman:~$ du -h /home/sathya/Downloads/kubuntu\ debs/
35M     /home/sathya/Downloads/kubuntu debs

But this isn’t sufficient, and neither is it very elegant. You want to know how much space each file is occupying, or what’s the max filesize occupied by a file. And you want to achieve this with out any console commands. Sounds tough?

Not really! Konqueror comes with an inbuilt “File Size View” which allows you to do just that. And the neat thing is that this works for all mounted partitons. To open this view, open Konqueror. Right click, choose Preview in and select “File Size View”

Once this is selected, another view comes up, showing the size of each file. It may take a minute or two as the filesystem is scanned and the files begin to show up. In the end you’ll get a view like:

This is really useful if you want to free up some space on your hard disk, or if you don’t know which file is taking up all that space.

PS: I don’t know of a similar utility for GNOME, as I don’t use it. Would appreciate it if any GNOME users can comment on a similar app.

PPS: If you’re using KDE 4.x , then as of now, Dolphin doesn’t have the File Size view, so you can’t check this. There’s another program, KDirStat, which can perform the same utility, but I haven’t tested this. Any comment on this would be much appreciated as well!