Linux.Desktop.Hacks [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Hack 37. Ai Karamba! Flashy KDE Gadgets!

Spiff up your KDE desktop with various
information panels and interactive gadgets.

This tip involves two programs, karamba and
superkaramba. The author of the original
program, karamba, is Hans Karlsson (Figure 5-1 shows an example of a
superkaramba-transformed desktop. It replaces
the panel with a custom blue kicker (application launcher) and
various statistics about your machine (CPU usage, etc.). A separate
superkaramba applet replaces the
taskbar with a subtler version at the top
of the screen. In addition, there is a chrome clock and an animated
weather applet. Click the cloud or a forecast day to see it will
whirl around into a summary of weather for that day.

Figure 5-1. KDE with superkaramba

It is generally easy to find
prepackaged versions of
superkaramba for most Linux distributions.
Debian and Gentoo Linux include superkaramba as
a standard package you can download. You might get the best results
by searching the Internet yourself, but you can find a Red Hat 9
superkaramba RPM at http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php?content=7774.
This package reportedly works for Mandrake, too. You can find a
number of SUSE RPMs for superkaramba at
http://linux01.gwdg.de/~pbleser/rpm-navigation.php?cat=/Utilities/superkaramba.

Not all the prepackaged versions are up-to-date, and many of the
nicest gadgets require the latest version. If you
can't resist some of the latest and greatest
gadgets, download the latest superkaramba source
code from http://netdragon.sourceforge.net/ and compile
it yourself. (You can also find some of the latest gadgets at this
site.) Sooner or later, you'll also find the latest
RPMs at the SourceForge.net site.

The superkaramba program depends heavily on the Python language (it won't work without Python installed). Many of the gadgets for superkaramba employ features available only if you have the Python extensions for KDE and Qt installed, too. I highly recommend that you make sure you have these extensions installed in addition to superkaramba itself. They are generally called PyQt and PyKDE, but your distribution might package them under very different names.

If you want to get an idea of the diversity of
karamba and superkaramba,
browse the site at http://www.kde-look.org/index.php?xcontentmode=38,
where you will find pages upon pages of available system monitors,
clocks, launch bars, and countless other gadgets.
superkaramba has been maturing over the years.
Many new gadgets now include a configuration menu for customizing the
gadget, whereas older gadgets still force you to edit configuration
files. I recommend placing
your superkaramba
gadgets in a single location such as ~/gadgets.

The one place you should not use as the location for your gadgets is ~/.superkaramba. This is a special directory that superkaramba creates and uses to store settings. If you try to store your gadgets there, superkaramba simply will not work.

For this example,
download
ChromeClock, which you can preview at http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php?content=12972.
You can download the file directly from http://www.kde-look.org/content/download.php?content=12972&id=1.

Create the ~/gadgets directory, and then
download your gadget (the downloaded file is named
12972-ChromeClock.tar.bz2) and extract it to
~/gadgets:

$ mkdir ~/gadgets
$ tar jxvf 12972-ChromeClock.tar.bz2 -C ~/gadgets

This creates a subdirectory called
~/gadgets/ChromeClock, which holds the
ChromeClock files. One or more of the files it
creates will have a .theme suffix. This is the
file you launch with superkaramba. If there is
more than one theme file, you can try launching each one separately.
Each probably represents preconfigured combinations of different
features.

Assuming you are currently running KDE, just issue this command to
launch this gadget:

$ superkaramba ~/gadgets/ChromeClock/ChromeClock.theme

A clock should appear on the desktop. (If you don't
see it, you might have to switch to an empty desktop!)

Right-click the clock and you should see menu selections to configure
the clock, lock it into position, and update the configuration so
that it remembers your settings. If you really like the clock once
you have it configured to your tastes, you should configure it to
start automatically when your desktop loads [Hack #72] .

Another way to start a superkaramba gadget is to
issue the command superkaramba with no
arguments. This should bring up a screen that looks like the one
shown in Figure 5-2.

Figure 5-2. SuperKaramba program

Click Open... and a KDE file dialog will appear to let you navigate
to any directory that contains a superkaramba
theme.

Now that you've had a taste of
superkaramba, visit http://www.kde-look.org/index.php?xcontentmode=38,
browse through the selections, and try some of the more versatile and
interactive gadgets.

Be careful not to download a gadget that requires a later version of superkaramba than the version you have installed, unless you are prepared to compile and install the latest version of superkaramba itself.