]> Michael McBride

mpmcbride7@yahoo.com

&FDLNotice; 2002-02-02 3.00.00 This documentation describes &kde;'s control centre. KDE kcontrol configuration settings module The &kcontrolcenter; (from now on referred to simply as the control centre) provides you with a centralised and convenient way to configure all of your &kde; settings. The control centre is made up of multiple modules. Each module is a separate application, but the control centre organises all of these programs into a convenient location. Each control centre module can be executed individually See section entitled Running individual control centre modules for more information. The control centre groups the configuration modules into categories, so they are easy to locate. Within each category, the control centre 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 centre itself. For information on individual modules, please see Control Centre Modules The &kcontrolcenter; can be started 3 ways: By selecting K ButtonControl Centre from the &kde; Panel. By pressing &Alt;F2. This will bring up a dialogue 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 centre, you are presented with a window, which can be divided into 3 functional parts. Screenshot Screenshot The &kde; Control Centre Screen Across the top is a menubar. The menubar will provide you with quick access to most of &kcontrolcenter;'s features. The menus are detailed in The &kde; Control Centre 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 main panel shows you some system information. In this example, we are running &kde; 2.99, we started &kcontrolcenter; as user adridg, the computer is named aramis, it is a FreeBSD system, Version 4.4-RELEASE, on a Pentium. This next section gives you a brief description of what each menu item does. The File menu has a single entry. &Ctrl;Q File Quit Closes the control centre. These options determine how the module selection looks and behaves. View Mode Determines whether to use Tree view, or Icon view for your modules. With Tree view, each submenu appears as an indented list. With Icon view, when you click on a category, the categories disappear and are replaced with the module list. You then use the up button to return to the categories. ViewIcon 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. If you choose Tree View, the Small icon size will be used, no matter what size was previously selected in Icon View. The modules menu is a shortcut to take you directly to any module in the control centre. &help.menu.documentation; You can exit the control centre one of three ways: Select File Quit from the menu bar. Type &Ctrl;Q on the keyboard. Click on the Close button on the frame surrounding the control centre. 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 organised 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: 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. Use Defaults This button will restore this module to its default values. You must click OK to save the options. Apply Clicking this button will save all changes to &kde;. If you have changed anything, clicking Apply will cause the changes to take effect. Reset This button will Reset the module. The exact effect will depend on the module. 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 have installed additional software. 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 will allow any user of your system to put it into suspend or standby 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 are any security concerns before giving any program root permissions. &kcontrol; Program copyright 1997-2001 The &kcontrolcenter; 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 deller@kde.org Mark Donohoe Pat Dowler Duncan Haldane duncan@kde.org Steffen Hansen stefh@mip.ou.dk. Matthias Hoelzer-Kluepfel hoelzer@kde.org Martin Jones mjones@kde.org Jost Schenck jost@schenck.de Jonathan Singer jsinger@leeta.net Thomas Tanghus tanghus@earthling.net Krishna Tateneni tateneni@pluto.njcc.com > Ellis Whitehead ewhitehe@uni-freiburg.de Conversion to British English: Malcolm Hunter malcolm.hunter@gmx.co.uk &underFDL; &underGPL;