Penguin
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Acronym for the K Desktop Environment. (Like K-RAD, but a desktop, not a uh, RAD).

This DesktopEnvironment is one of the two most popular for Linux. (The other is GNOME.)

Often used because it is easy to configure, and can look similar to windows by default. Great for newbies and highly configureable by those more advanced. A bit too much eye candy for some, perhaps. Ships as the default desktop mainly on European distributions; Americans tend to prefer GNOME.

KDE has recently hit version 3.2. It uses TrollTech's Qt widget library.


KDE Hints

Removing the stupid dragon from KDE's Logout window

When you logout from KDE you will see a cute cartoon of a dragon in the logout window. It is called Konqi. After your 100th logout Konqi will no longer be cute. The dragon cartoon is stored in a PNG file called shutdownkonq.png which can be overwritten with anything you like. (Pictures with transparent backgrounds will look the best.) This file is found in the directory /usr/X11R6/share/apps/ksmserver/pics/ on RedHat, /usr/share/apps/ksmserver/pics/ on Mandrake and in /opt/kde3/share/apps/ksmserver/pics/ on SuSE.

(I almost forgot: IsomerMadeMeDoThis.)


Changing KDE's default web browser

By default, KDE will open web links using konquerer. There's nothing in the GUI config that will let you change this, nor is there any help in kde.org's own FAQ's or mailing lists, and a google search turns up many people asking how with very few functional replies. Usually they suggest changing the MIME associations for text/html, which only changes how KDE opens html documents when they're sitting on your desktop.

So, after almost six hours of googling, asking on IRC, and generally making a pest of myself I finally found out that under debian at least it is trivially easy; just set the BROWSER environment variable to point to the browser you want.

This doesn't appear to actually be documented anywehre that google knows about, so hopefully mentioning it on the WIKI will help a few people.

ANOTHER way of doing this is to make/edit the file /.kde/share/config/kfmclientrc as follows:

[Settings?
!ExternalBrowser?=/path.to/browser/binaryfile