Linux Desktop Hacks

126

|

Chapter 5, KDE Desktop

#38 Start Applications in Weird and Wonderful Ways

HACK

Adding Application Options

In addition to the facilities available in kstart, you can also combine the

options and switches from the program you are running. Each Linux program

has accessible options similar to the ones you used in kstart, and you can view

them in the application manpage. Many programs also have a

–-help option

that will list the different options available:

foo@bar:~$ kstart --help

As an example of combining these options, you can load Konqueror full

screen in web-browsing mode to look at the O’Reilly web site:

foo@bar:~$ kstart --fullscreen konqueror --profile webbrowsing http://www.

oreilly.com/

In this example you use the –-profile option in Konqueror to set the mode

of the application to

webbrowsing. You also specify the URL of the O’Reilly

web site as the site to be loaded into Konqueror when the application starts.

It is important to note that the kstart options (

--fullscreen) are to the right

of the kstart command and the Konqueror options (

--profile webbrowsing

http://www.oreilly.com/

) are to the right of the konqueror command.

Starting Programs Conveniently

Although you have been typing your kstart commands into a terminal, you

can actually use a desktop icon to run the commands. To do this, add a

shortcut by right-clicking the desktop and selecting New Shortcut. In the

command box, add the full ...