Many questions about KDE4

[kevin79]

I started to check out KDE4 today and have a some (many) questions about it. I'll try to lay them about as well as I can. If you can answer any of them, I would really appreciate it! For reference, I am using a Dell Latitude D820 laptop.

• I have my clock set up to show the date. Is there a way to change the format of the date? I would like to have it show mM/dD/YYYY instead of dD Month, YYYY
• How do I get the Trash bin on the taskbar?
• How do I add/remove programs from KMenu?
• I added the battery applet to the panel, how do I configure it so that it only shows one battery?
• In KDE 3.5.x, when I use the volume up/down/mute buttons on my laptop, a display pops up on my screen that shows the volume level, how do I get this in KDE4?
• How do I have the volume icon change when I mute the volume?
• Is there a weather app for KDE4 like Liquid Weather++ or Kweather?
• Panel specific questions
  • Is there a way to have the "System Menu" icon show up?
  • Is there a way to get the "Desktop" icon show up?
  • Is there a way to have quick launch icons show up as smaller icons, in two rows? (See attached screenshot)
  • Is there a way to link an icon to a folder so that the folder expands when the icon is clicked? (See screenshot)
  
  
• How do I get the following programs to autostart?
  • Power Manager (or an alternative)
  • Ksynaptics
  • KNetworkManager
  • Akregator
  • Korganizer
• Finally, is there an alternative to KGmailNotifier that works in KDE4?

Thanks!

[Tomas Ã…]

Re: Many questions about KDE4

Here are answers to some of your questions.

How do I get the Trash bin on the taskbar?

The trash-applet is not finished yet, it should show up later; I know they're working on it.

How do I add/remove programs from KMenu?

Open a terminal and run the command kmenuedit.

I added the battery applet to the panel, how do I configure it so that it only shows one battery?

It looks like a bug which has not been fixed yet: http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=156078

Is there a way to have the "System Menu" icon show up?

Do you mean the sub-menu of the K-menu which is above "Run command" on KDE3, and which contains Home, Media, Trash and stuff? Then I have also searched for it. Seems they haven't finished it yet.

Is there a way to get the "Desktop" icon show up?

Don't know if there is an icon, but you can press Ctrl+F12 to show the desktop.

How do I get the following programs to autostart?
Power Manager (or an alternative)
Ksynaptics
KNetworkManager
Akregator
Korganizer

Autostart seems a bit broken in KDE4. Myself I couldn't just drag the application's .desktop-file to $HOME/.kde4/Autostart like I used to. After some testing I got it to work somehow; use the below template and just replace the Name and Exec fields.
For example with korganizer I created a file called korgac.desktop in $HOME/.kde4/Autostart with these contents:

[Desktop Entry]
Name=KOrganizer Reminder Client
Exec=korgac --miniicon korganizer
Type=Application
X-KDE-autostart-after=panel
X-KDE-autostart-phase=2
X-KDE-StartupNotify=false

Akregator though doesn't seem to like my method. You can create a link though:

ln -s /usr/bin/akregator $HOME/.kde4/Autostart

The above linking you can do with any program you would like to autostart, you just have to find where it lies (usually in /usr/bin but KDE4-apps lies in /usr/lib/kde4/bin/ IF you have both KDE3 and KDE4 installed at the same time).
But if you create links, you cannot specify arguments like in the case with my korganizer-file (I like to start akregator minimized for example, which you must use an argument to do); then you have to create a shell script instead...