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"Cool" System Tray features in KDE 3.4


lawsonrc
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This may belong in Tips and Tricks instead of here; I'm not sure.

 

These features may not be new in KDE, but I've been playing with them in 3.4. Now some of you may have the urge to reply and say "I don't use these icons so often; I can do this from MCC; it takes up too many resources..." Okay, I'm aware of that, but this is for those that are interested.

 

Anyway, for those of you who aren't aware, here they are:

 

1. The System Tray can now show and hide items, just like the Notification Tray in WindowsXP. Just click on the left top arrow and choose Configure System Tray..... When the window opens, you can select items on the systray that you need but not often, then use the right arrow to put them in the Hidden Icons folder. Click Apply and OK. The System Tray now has hidden the items. To view them you will see a fat blue arrow. When you click on it, it expands the System Tray when you need the hidden items. I like it better than WinXP tray because it stays open whereas the WinXP tray will close on you sometimes and you have to reopen it more than once. To close it, just click on the arrow again and the hidden icons are hidden. ADVANTAGE: When icons are hidden, it gives you more space on the panel.

 

2. KRandRtray: this is the system tray icon used for resizing your screen resolution, etc. Much quicker than MCC. You can do it on the fly. If you don't have it in your System Tray and you want it go to Menu>System>Configuration>Hardware>KRandRtray (Resize and Rotate).

 

3. On some laptops, such as the Toshiba 5205-S703 and hopefully many others: if you have Klaptop in the System Tray for battery usage and/or charging the battery, you can right-click on the icon and "Screen Brightness...." may appear. If you click on that, you get a slider (like the one for volume) that you can move up or down to adjust the brightness of your screen. This one is super-cool!!! If it does not appear on the system tray, go to "kcontrol" (the run command) or KDE Control Center>Power Control>Laptop Battery>and put the "x" next to Show battery monitor" and "Notify me whenever my battery becomes fully charged. Then in the bottom right of the window, click the button that says "Start Battery Monitor" and VOILA! it is now on the system tray.

 

4. The Netapplet (Menu>System>Monitoring>NetApplet). This applet is very useful for Laptop in order to monitor your laptop connection to your wireless card or a Cat5 cable to you Ethernet. It lets you know if you can get on the Internet or not. If you are not able to get to the internet, then you go to MCC>Network and Internet>Set Up a New Network Interface.) The NetApplet is great if you boot up and see the "X" on the NetApplet. You then know that you can't use the Internet. That way, if you're like me, you will avoid opening up Firefox with about 12 tabs as "home pages" and sit there closing each tab since you're not on the net! How frustrating that is!

 

Is there anyone else who puts applets on the system tray and you wish to share them here?

Please keep all responses positive and about "cool" uses of the system tray.

 

Regards,

 

Richard L.

Edited by lawsonrc
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I only tend to have two on mine, they are K-Mix, found in Multimedia, and kwikdisk found in Monitoring.

 

K-Mix is just for volume control, etc for your sound card. Kwikdisk allows you to view your partitions and how much space you have free.

 

The one other item I used to have was under the kdetoys items in Games, and it was the Moon applet, that allowed you to view when it was going to be a full moon. Nothing special, but a bit of fun :P

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there's also a system monitor built into kde. it monitors cpu usage, swap, and memory usage. i use it alot. i keep klaptop_acpi_helper (i think this is the actual name for it) as well as kmix, kwireless, and the sys. monitor applet. of course time and date are there.

 

now also, gaim can dock to the tray. it's really awesome.

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