monline

Some (maybe all?) of the "System settings" configuration screens in KDE are implemented in Python scripts (found in /var/lib/python-support/python2.5/). It might happen that one of the configuration screens does not load, instead you get some error messages complaining that something failed. In my example the "Monitor and Display" configuration failed to load and as such, I could not change resolution.

To my best knowledge, there's no UI in Kate to set the default encoding used with new documents or documents opened by file association (eg. double-click on a text file in Konqueror or starting Kate from the command line). However Kate _has_ a logic for setting the default encoding.

The feature of the bouncing cursor is called "launch feedback" and you can turn it on/off on a per application basis in KDE 3.5.6. Go to the K Menu, go to the application you want to change (do not left-click the application menu item!), right-click it, select "Edit item", clear the "Enable launch feedback" checkbox, close the KDE Menu Editor and save the changes. This is the only way to do it in the above mentioned KDE version through the GUI.

Kopete (the KDE instant messanger) supports grouping of serveral contacts into meta-contacts. Eg. if you've a friend who uses several messenger services (ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, Google Talk), then you can have a single item in your contact list grouping all the various accounts of that one person. The question is which contact are you going to talk to if you double-click the name in the contact list? If all of the sub-contacts of the given meta-contact are online, then Kopete takes the default from the first contact that became part of the meta-contact. Putting it in other words: the default will be the contact that you used to assign other sub-contacts to.

Recently I've posted on how to use External Tools in Kate. I wanted to use the word count example script that is described in the article about "DCOP scripting the Kate application". But it didn't work. Of course I did not give up and finally made my version that works.

KDE's advanced text editor (Kate) allows one to run scripts using the "Tools / External Tools / *" menu items. The feature is documented here.

The trivial method to change your password is to launch a terminal and type passwd. However KDE has a GUI for changing passwords too. You can reach it in "System Settings / Personal section / About Me / Change Password". This actually launches the kdepasswd application (you can check this by launching the "Change password" screen as described before, then query the properties of the new window with xprop, look for the "_NET_WM_PID(CARDINAL)" property and its value -which is the process id of the kdepasswd program-, and query the process parameters of the given PID with eg. ps -p PID -o args). So if you want to place a "Change password" shortcut on users' desktop or somewhere in the menu, then kdepasswd is the app for the link to point to.

It seems there's no way to change the ordering of contact list items (or groups) in Kopete. At least I did not find reference to any sort of support by the app. The only way to do it is to add ordering strings to the start of the labels. Eg. I've prepended "1. " and "2. " to the names of my most used groups, thus they appear at the top of my contact list.

Google has an extensive set of help pages describing how to connect to Google Talk with various IM clients. Here's the page for connecting with Kopete, KDE's default instant messenger client.

I've found a bug in KDE's Konqueror. If you access a webserver solely through its hostname (no FQDN, eg. a server on a small company intranet) and you try to reach it via SSL (https://) and that server has a self-signed certificate with a common name equal to its hostname, then Konqueror will keep bugging you with a confirmation dialog with the following message: Konqueror - Server Authentication
You have indicated that you wish to accept this certificate, but it is not issued to the server who is presenting it. Do you wish to continue loading?

It doesn't make a difference if you told Konqueror to accept the certificate forever. It'll keep asking you the same thing again and again.