Decorating the Desktop Superkaramba Is Always a Pretty Sight, with a Collection of Themes That Allow Users to Give Their Desktops That Personal Touch

LINUX USER KTools

Ktools: Superkaramba Decorating the Desktop SuperKaramba is always a pretty sight, with a collection of themes that allow users to give their desktops that personal touch.

BY STEFANIE TEUFEL

main innovation introduced by can set the KDEDIRS environment vari- Superkaramba is the program’s able as follows: scripting ability, with Python for example. This scripting extension export KDEDIRS=/opt/kde3:/usr/U means that the program is even local/kde better suited to interactive use. At present, developers are After successfully building the program, working hard on the next gener- you should have an entry for Tools | www.photocase.de ation of desktop extensions, SuperKaramba in your Start menu. Click however, the Release Candidate the entry to launch the program. Alter- of version 1.0 is so unstable that natively, type superkaramba & in a we decided to restrict this article terminal window. You will be rewarded to the current stable version 0.34. with the sight of a welcome screen like The program is available from the the one in Figure 1. The screen prompts he SuperKaramba desktop exten- project homepage at http://netdragon. you to decide where to go next. sion really livens up your desktop. sourceforge.net/index.php?page=Down Clicking Help… will take you directly TSuperKaramba is useful for a wide load%20SuperKaramba. to the program help page, if you have an range of tasks, such as displaying proces- As is so often the case when work is in Internet connection; Download… takes sor load or memory usage information, progress, there are no logfiles, or newsfeeds, Superkaramba official RPM packages at gives you a tidy and flexible approach to this time of writing. setting up your desktop. After you download Flexibility is one of SuperKaramba’s Superkaramba and then biggest benefits. With just a few lines of unpack the source code, script you can quickly modify the pro- you will need to build gram to reflect your needs. This the application yourself. flexibility means that there is no such Again, the three card thing as a default Superkaramba configu- trick will work here: ration. But read on to learn more about a configure; make; make colorful assortment of preconfigured install. And, as usual, examples (also know as themes) that don’t forget to set the range from extremely useful to just KDEDIRS environmental pretty. variable to reflect the Some readers may be familiar with the path to your KDE direc- Figure 1:The SuperKaramba welcome screen takes you to some predecessor to Superkaramba, which tories. For instance, you important places. was simply known as Karamba. The GLOSSARY KTools Python: Python is a scripting language that ules (for sound and image file manipulation In this column we present tools,month by was developed in the early 90s by Guido van or XML export,for example),and the fact that month,which have proven to be especially Rossum. If you are afraid of snakes,don’t the interpreter is available for nearly any useful when working under KDE,solve a worry – the program derives its name from operating system platform,have made problem which otherwise is deliberately the British comedy group,Monty Python. Python a universally accepted language. Python is useful for coding scripts for the However,in contrast to Perl and PHP,Python ignored,or are just some of the nicer things Linux shell,just like Perl,but it can just as eas- was designed to be an object-oriented lan- in life,which – once discovered – you would ily be used to program complete applications guage right from the beginning. not want to do without. for the Linux desktop. A wide variety of mod-

72 February 2005 www.linux-magazine.com KTools LINUX USER

uptime command, and controls for the popular XMMS audio player. Calculating The Dashboard Calculator 1 theme (http://www.kde- look.org/content/ Figure 7:The Dash- show.php?content board Calculator =14426) gives looks (and behaves) a users a full- lot like Mac OS X. Figure 2: Opening a theme in SuperKaramba. featured desktop Figure 4: Pity the weather isn’t as easy to change calculator that reminds one of Mac OS X you to the application’s official themes as the theme. (see Figure 7). If you have become page (direct links to the current themes accustomed to single clicking as a KDE are also listed in the right-hand panel); parency to your desktop. Of course this user, this application might just drive and clicking Open… allows you to load only looks good if you have a back- you to distraction, as it requires a dou- the Superkaramba themes on your com- ground image set up; if not, you may not ble-click for input and calculations. If so, puter. be able to see what is going on. you might like to right click with the Incidentally, instead of just visiting the Right click the theme to open the con- mouse to drop down the context menu default download page, you might also text menu, where you can and lock the theme. This will like to drop by http://www.kde-look.org. Open new theme, lock or restore the theme to typical The Karamba section has a lot more unlock the position of a single-click behavior. themes than the official project page. But theme (Toggle locked posi- the developers promise that this will all tion), Close this theme, Cloudy Patches, be changing soon, as the Themes archive Quit the program, or edit Mainly Dry will soon be leaving beta and is due to the theme source code. To Umbrella or sunglasses? be extended in the near future. do so, select the last item Winter coat or suncream? You might also notice a cannon ball in Edit Theme, and Superka- The Liquid Weather theme your kicker; this gives you access to the ramba will load the (http://www.message.co.nz/ themes on your computer, allows you to source code for the cur- ~matt-sarah/lwp-3.1.1.tar. load additional themes, or lets you close rent theme in your default bz2) not only keeps you up to active themes (Figure 2). editor. Check out the fol- date with the latest weather lowing pages for a report, but also has forecasts Thematically Speaking… HOWTO on modifying for up to five days in a neat As previously mentioned, you can click parameters to change the Figure 5: Besides displaying display. After loading the Open in the selection window to open a appearance and function- system information, the theme, you can drop down theme. The default package includes a ality of the theme: http:// Ubermon theme gives you the context menu to config- test theme called main.theme, which is netdragon.sourceforge. MP3 player controls. ure the theme (Configure hidden in superkaramba-0.34/exam- net/index.php?page= theme Figure 4.) ples/autoHide/. Create+A+Theme, or http://www.efd. The easiest way to find your local As you can see in Figure 3, the theme lth.se/~d98hk/karamba. weather is to select Find location on shows you the system time, the CPU weather.com – just input the name of the usage, or the memory load. Just like any It’s a Colorful World nearest town. Don’t worry if your entry other theme, it seamlessly adds trans- The Ubermon theme (http://www. for the weather search doesn’t turn up kde-look.org/content/ any results. You need to show.php?content= reload the theme to get it 13166), which is shown to show your local in Figure 5, is similar to weather. (Our example in main.theme but a lot Figure 6 shows USCITY- more colorful. Addition- HERE.) You can even opt ally, the theme displays to Use metric units (Cel- the kernel and KDE ver- sius) if you prefer to view sion numbers, gives you Figure 6: Liquid Weather brings the weather report with Figure 3: All the information you need in pretty a network traffic mo- the weather forecast to your temperatures in Celsius packing. nitor, output from the desktop. rather than Fahrenheit.