Glorious LXF126 Contest

If you are the winner in my glorious Linux Format 2009 Christmas Issue giveaway, here's what you have to look forward to:

• Ultimate eye candy

  - a pretty interesting article on how to get the most dazzling display, whether you use Compiz, KDE, or GNOME. Despite my general disdain for eye candy, I would try the Compiz/Emerald 3d window manager if it worked on dual monitors, but last I looked it didn't support them.



• KDE distributions

  - coincidentally enough, just as I'm looking to move on up from my OpenSUSE 11.0 install, along comes LXF with their KDE distro Roundup. I wouldn't have to go too far afield if I stayed with their winner, which is OpenSUSE 11.2, but I'm trying out a couple of other ones they regard highly, like Sabayon and Sidux. I'm a KDE man, so it works out well.



• Get to grips with /proc and /sysfs

  - this is an excellent overview of the virtual filesystems /proc and /sysfs.



• DVD Coverdisc

  - the DVD coverdisc includes live previews of the latest versions of KDE and GNOME, which is pretty cool. It also includes Ubuntu Netbook Remix (which I think I'll try on my Dell Mini), Moblin 2.0 and Puppy Linux 4.3.

To enter my little contest, where I will mail you a pristine copy of LXF #126, along with the DVD coverdisc, just drop me an email at jdarnold@buddydog.org. On Monday, Dec. 7th, probably in the evening, I will randomly select one entry and email you back asking for your mailing address and soon it will show up on your doorstep. Open to both of my international readers too :)

Oh, and I also heartily endorse subscribing to the magazine. Yeah, it's pretty expensive, but if you do it via the TuxRadar web page, you can cut it down to US$99 for 13 issues. And, as a subscriber, you get access to all the back issues in PDF format and they really have gotten their act together with it. The PDFs look great and they have a nice HTML page linking it all together. You won't be disappointed.

Walking on Sunshine

Sorry it has been so quiet, but it has been that way for two very good and positive reasons:

1. Everything has been working all too smoothly. openSUSE has just been solid, needing virtually no twiddling at all. Complain all you might want about Novell, but when something works as well as openSUSE does, I'm all over it!


2. And I just haven't had the time to fiddle. There's a few things I want to try, but with summer coming, and a new release imminent, I just haven't had the time or desire to futz about with the computer.

I have a few things in the queue to work on, and I'll post my results. But until then, I'll leave you with these little KDE shortcuts that I truly miss on Windows:

• Maximize a window, both vertically and horizontally - left click on the Maximize button (duh)


• Maximize a window, just vertically - middle click on the Maximize button


• Maximize a window, just horizontally - right click on the Maximize button

Tab-way to Heaven

Yay! I finally solved the biggest small annoyance I currently had on my new openSUSE box. I'm using KDE, with dual monitors and two desktops, and Alt-Tab wasn't showing apps currently running on the "other" monitor. It was very weird. I did enable the setting to go through all the desktops, which is hard enough to find. KDE Control Center -> Desktop -> Window Behavior, and select the "Traverse windows on all desktops" option, which is the only right solution, as that is the easiest way to go from desktop to desktop. I'm not a huge fan of multiple desktops, but they work much better on KDE than they do using any of the various hacks to enable them on Windows.

But, oddly enough, ever since I began running openSUSE, Alt-Tab would only show me windows that were displayed on the current *monitor*. It would correctly show me ones on both desktops, but not both monitors, which drove me crazy. I asked a few different places for a solution, to no avail. But my latest plea on the opensuse-kde mailing list got me an answer!

It seems the latest version of KDE added a few Xinerama "improvements", as listed here. One of these "improvements" is that the Alt-tab list of windows can be restricted to a single screen (monitor), as someone even claimed that having alt-tab show all the windows was a bug, which is insane. And just about as crazy is that this new option was made the default! I could see that some deranged individuals might actually desire having alt-tab only show windows on the current monitor, but to make that the new default option is a mistake.

And, even better, another response showed me a quickie way to set this new, undocumented, no-UI option:

$ kwriteconfig --file kwinrc --group Windows --key SeparateScreenFocus --type bool true
$ dcop kwin default reconfigure

kwriteconfig is one of those well-nigh undocumented KDE helper apps, which abound, and include the vitally important dcop, which is a way of sending commands from the commandline to windows. So this makes the SeparateScreenFocus option true and tells KDE to re-read its configuration data. You can also edit ~/.kde/share/config/kwinrc by hand, setting the value to what you want:

• true: show windows on all screens in alt+tab


• false: only show windows on current screen in alt+tab

1

Come Out Please, Panel

A seemingly common KDE bug is that the panel, after hiding, never comes back. Sometimes I found just logging out and logging back in will make it come back, but that isn't always true. Here's some methods I've come across to fix this problem, something that is even more common in dual monitor setups like mine:

• $ rm ~/.kde/share/config/kickerr

  , then logout and back in.


• Toggle the autohide mode



• $ killall kicker

  , then restart kicker

See these bugs for more info:

http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=118551

http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=80469

http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=39307