Chapter 18. KDE
The K Desktop Environment (KDE) is an open source software project that provides a consistent, user-friendly, contemporary desktop for Unix and Linux systems. KDE is not simply a window manager like fvwm, but a whole desktop environment including services to assist end users, application developers, and system administrators in standardizing the look and feel of their applications and configuring their systems. The KDE interface makes full use of drag-and-drop functionality so that, for instance, you can grab an icon for a text file in the file manager and drag it to a text editor window to open it. Full network integration of KDE applications allows you to transparently access files from other computers or FTP sites and manipulate them as if they were local.
KDE also implements a standard help system based on HTML. Applications that display a Help button offer a specific file of documentation for that application in the help viewer.
One goal of KDE is to provide the user with system information and configuration through easy-to-use graphical interfaces on the desktop. The KDE Control Center is a central utility for desktop and application configuration, as well as a source of information for important system components. The Information module of the Control Center can retrieve and display status information for your processor, memory, PCI bus, network devices, and many other hardware components on your system.
A wide variety of applications has been developed to take ...
Get Linux in a Nutshell, Fourth Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
