]]> %ents; ]> Michael McBride

mpmcbride7@yahoo.com

04/02/2001 2.00.00 This documentation describes &kde;'s control center. KDE kcontrol configuration settings module The &kcontrol; (from now on referred to simply as the control center) provides you with a centralized and convenient way to configure all of your &kde; settings. The control center is made up of multiple modules. Each module is a separate application, but the control center organizes all of these programs into a convenient location. Each control center module can be executed individually See section entitled Running individual control center modules for more information. The &kcontrol; groups the configuration modules into categories, so they are easy to locate. Within each category, the control center shows all the modules in a list, so it is easier to find the right configuration module. This next section details the use of the control center itself. For information on individual modules, please see Control Center Modules The &kcontrol; can be started 3 ways: By selecting K ButtonControl Center from the &kde; Panel. By pressing &Alt;F2. This will bring up a dialog box. Type kcontrol, and click Run. You can type kcontrol & at any command prompt. All three of these methods are equivalent, and produce the same result. When you start the control center, you are presented with a window, which can be divided into 3 functional parts. Screenshot Screenshot The KDE Control Center Screen Across the top is a menubar. The menubar will provide you with quick access to most of Kcontrol's features. The menus are detailed in The KDE Control Center Menus. Along the left hand side, is a column. This is a where you choose which module to configure. You can learn how to navigate through the modules in the section called Navigating Modules. The grey box on the lower right side (with the wizard), shows you some useful system information. In this example, we are running KDE 2.0, we started kcontrol as user mmcbride, the computer is named btnrg1, it is a Linux system, kernel version 2.2.16-storm, on a Pentium II. This next section gives you a brief description of what each menu item does. The file menu has a single entry. CtrlQ File Quit Closes the control center. These options determine how the module selection looks and acts. View Mode Determines whether to use tree view, or list view for your modules. With tree view, each submenu appearing as an indented list. With list view, when you click on a category, the categories disappear and are replaced with the module list. You then use an up button to return to your categories. View Icon Size Using this option, you can choose small, medium, or large icons to select your modules.This menu item only controls the icon size if you are in Icon View. Users who use the Tree View, will not observe any effects with this option. The modules menu, is a shortcut to take you directly to any module in the control center. F1 Help Contents Clicking on this, will take you to the top of this document. CtrlF1 Help What's This? Selecting this option, changes the cursor to an arrow with a question mark. Now if you click on any component of the control panel pane, you get short context sensitive help about that item.This is the fastest way to get helpful advice on what any of the controls will do. Help Report Bug... If you discover a bug, you can select this option to automatically collect bug information and submit it to the KDE developers. Help About Kcontrol... Selecting this option displays a dialog box containing copyright, author and license information. Help About KDE... This will display a dialog box with contact information reguarding the KDE project. You can exit the control center one of three ways: Select File Quit from the menu bar. Type CtrlQ on the keyboard. Click on the Close button on the frame surrounding the control center. You can run individual modules without running kcontrol by selecting K Button Preferences from the &kde; panel. You can then select the module you want to run in the submenus. In order to make it as easy as possible, the &kcontrol; has organized similar options into groups. Each group is called a module. When you click on the name of a module in the left window, you will be presented with the options of the module on the right. Each module will have some or all of the following buttons: Apply Clicking this button will save all changes to &kde;. If you have changed anything, clicking Apply will take the changes in effect. Reset This button will Reset the module. The exact effect will depend on the module. Help This button will give you help specific to the current module. The button will show you a short summary help page in the left window. At the bottom of that window, you can click on a link to get more detailed help. Default This button will restore this module to its default values. You must click "OK" to save the options. You must save the options of one module using Apply before you can change to a different module. If you try to change without saving your options, you will be asked if you want to save your changes, or discard them. This is a list of the standard configuration modules (sorted by category) provided by the KDE base package. Please note that there may be many more modules on your system if you install additional software. File Browsing File Associations, File Manager, Help Help Index, Information DMA Information, Device Information, IO Port Information, Interupt Information, Memory Information, PCI Information, PCMCIA, Partition Information, Processor Information, SCSI Information, Samba Information, Sound Information, X Windows Server Information Look and Feel Background, Colors, Desktop, Fonts, Icons, Key Bindings, Panel, Screensaver, Session Manager, Style, System Notifications, Taskbar, Window Behavior, Mouse Behavior Network Windows Shares Peripherals Keyboard, Mouse Personalization Accesability, Country and Language, Crypto, E-mail, Keyboard Layout, Passwords Power Control Battery Monitor, Energy, Laptop Power Control, Low Battery Critical, Low Battery Warning Sound Midi, Mixer, Soundserver, System Bell System System Date and Time, Login Manager Session Manager, Web Browsing Cookies, Enhanced Browsing, Konqueror Browser, Netscape Plugins, Proxies, User Agent, Windows Shares In order to use the laptop modules, you must have the kernel APM package installed in your kernel. Useful information on how to do this can be found at http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/kharker/linux-laptop/apm.html and in the Battery Powered Linux mini-HOWTO at http://metalab.unc.edu/LDP/HOWTO/mini/Battery-Powered.html. If you want the suspend and standby menu commands to work then you should install the &Linux; apmd package (version 2.4 or later). If you want to use them from non-root accounts you must mark the apm command set uid root. To do this log on as root and enter: %chown root /usr/bin/apm;chmod +s /usr/bin/apm By doing this you allow any user of your system to put it into the suspend states - if you are the only user this should not be a problem. Also note that any program which has root access, can be a potential security problem. You should carefully determine if there is are any security concerns before giving any program root permissions. &access; &background; &batmon; &borders; &konqbrowse; &colors; &cookie; &locale; &datetime; &desktop; &devices; &dma; &email; &crypto; &energy; &enhbrowse; &fileassoc; &filemanage; &fonts; &helpindex; &icon; &ioports; &interrupts; &kbd; &kblayout; &keybind; &powerctrl; &loginmanager; &lowbatcrit; &lowbatwarn; &memory; &midi; &mixer; &mouse; &mousebehav; &nsplugins; &panel; &partitions; &password; &pci; &pcmcia; &processor; &proxie; &sambastatus; &screensaver; &scsi; &sessionman; &soundinfo; &sndserver; &style; &bell; &sysnotify; &taskbar; &useragent; &action; &winshares; &xserver; Kcontrol Program copyright 1997 The KDE Control Center Developers Contributors: Matthias Hoelzer-Kluepfel hoelzer@kde.org Matthias Elter elter@kde.org Documentation copyright 2000 Michael McBride mpmcbride7@yahoo.com Contributors: Paul Campbell paul@taniwha.com Helge Deller helge.deller@ruhruni-bochum.de Mark Donohoe Pat Dowler Duncan Haldane duncan@kde.org Steffen Hansen stefh@mip.ou.dk. Matthias Hölzer hoelzer@kde.org Martin Jones mjones@kde.org Jost Schenck jost@schenck.de Jonathan Singer jsinger@leeta.net Thomas Tanghustanghus@earthling.net Krishna Tateneni tateneni@pluto.njcc.com> Ellis Whitehead ewhitehe@uni-freiburg.de &underFDL; &underGPL;