There’s one thing for certain: Now is an exciting time to be a KDE user. The much anticipated launch of KDE 4 is slated for January 11th, 2008. This is a major revamp of the look and feel of the KDE desktop, with the inclusion of a built-in compositor (think eye candy) and something called “plasmoids” (little functional widgets embedded into your desktop).

It’s a lot of new “bling” aimed at improving the desktop experience. Will it? More importantly, will it for you? What would make you choose KDE over GNOME (or vice versa)? This week we take a brief look at KDE in both its 3.5.x and 4 incarnations, and outline a few rules of thumb on choosing your desktop environment.

Let’s take a quick look at KDE’s history and underpinnings. KDE was launched in 1996 and is based on the Qt (pronounced “cute”) toolkit. (A toolkit is a set of libraries of the things that make up a graphical user interface — things like windows, buttons and their functions.) But all was not right with the world. Qt, at that time, didn’t use a completely free software license. This caused some concern about the legality of linking to Qt libraries, and the Debian distribution even went so far as to remove KDE from their repositories for a time.

Currently, Qt uses a dual license. The toolkit is available under the GPL (GNU General Public License) and the QPL (Q Public License), and linking to the Qt libraries is no longer an issue.KDE looks a bit more Windows-like than GNOME, but has some quirks that puzzle new users. The K Menu, both in KDE 3.5.x and 4, is similar to the Windows “Start” menu. KDE is usually arranged with a bottom panel, featuring the K Menu button, and a few frequently accessed applications (such as your home folder and Konqueror, KDE’s native web browser). The panel often has a system tray and a list of open windows and desktop workspaces.

In KDE 4, the K Menu (among other things) got a radical makeover. The menu is divided into two parts, a lower panel consisting of several buttons: Favorites, Applications, My Computer, Recently Used and Leave (a really inelegant way of saying “shutdown menu”). The upper panel features animated menus depending on what is selected on the lower panel. Here you can see the Applications icon highlighted, with the Office applications loaded. It takes some getting used to (and is still a release candidate at the time of this post), but it is appealing to those who enjoy putting their own mark on the aesthetics and function of their desktop.

KDE is known for being highly customizable, both in terms of how the desktop looks and behaves, and how it ultimately handles the hardware on the system. The good news for you as a new Linux user is the amount of control you’ll have over the desktop. You’ll be able to configure things to look and act exactly as you want. The bad news? The amount of control you have can be puzzling to the point of frustration.

For example, setting up a printer in KDE opens a printer configuration window. Adding a new printer opens a wizard that walks you through the process. You’ll find there are a lot of extra configuration options outside the wizard. It’s safe to say many of them you won’t need to worry about. It can be disconcerting to have that many options initially, but those who need their system fine-tuned will appreciate it.
KDE Print Menu Dialog
What about the native Qt applications in KDE? Can GTK+ applications be used with KDE? Yes, but like Qt applications in GNOME, most like to keep this to a minimum. In general, we’ve found it causes less conflict and slow-down on the system to install GTK+ applications in KDE than it does to install Qt applications in GNOME.

Konqueror is the native KDE web browser. Firefox and other Mozilla based browsers, should you prefer them, work quite well in KDE. Dolphin was recently rolled out to replace Konqueror as KDE’s file manager. With split-view folder browsing (and dragging and dropping across panes), you won’t miss Windows Explorer at all.

KDE has a personal information manager suite, Kontact, consisting of KMail (an email client), a calendar, journal, note taker and the feed reader Akregator.

Digikam supports a variety of digital cameras, and is roughly equivalent to GNOME’s gtkam. Through the use of kipi-plugins, you can easily use Digikam to archive photos to CD or DVD or upload to Flickr. Krita is the KDE photo-editing program. (We admit to using GIMP in place of Krita for most editing applications.)

KOffice is KDE’s office suite, consisting of a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation and database application. There is also a Visio equivalent, and a vector graphic drawing application. OpenOffice, should you prefer it, integrates nicely with KDE. The desktop has two text editors, KWrite and Kate. We prefer Kate for most text editing tasks.

Multimedia files are handled with Kaffeine (video) and Amarok (audio). KDE also features the handy K3b burning application, which burns audio, video and data disks, as well as disk images.

Our advice to new Linux users who have little interest in looking “under the hood” of their computers, or who use their computer for straight web browsing, word processing and photo editing would be to try GNOME first. Former Windows (and Mac) “power users” will most likely want to start with KDE. We’d also encourage those who have computing requirements that are a little out of the ordinary to try KDE first, due to the level of customization it allows through the GUI. Before you make your decision, think about the programs that are associated with each desktop environment, and what you’d want to add on after the fact. If you find one toolkit’s programs fit your work habits better than the other’s, install the desktop with the most appealing applications.

GNOME or KDE? It might be GNOME this year, KDE the next, and Xfce after that. The beauty of Linux is that you’re not tied to one desktop environment, or even to one distribution. You’re free to have the system that works best for you.

With as much is going on these days to screw with our privacy it isn’t a bad idea to learn a little bit about encryption. Now, I know you may think that you aren’t doing anything private so what is the point? I’m not doing anything “private” either, it’s simply a matter of it not being any of anyone else’s business.

I have for some time now been interested in digitally signing my emails. And if you’ve seen me pop-up on a mailing list or got any emails from me in the last few days you’ve probably seen a digital signature in-line or as an attachment. Via this digital signature you can verify that the exact contents of the email into your box is the same contents that came out of mine, therefore maintaining integrity. If even *one* character changed the signature would not validate and you could tell the email or signature had been tampered with.

I have also started signing and encrypting emails to others that also have a PGP key pair that I have personally trust-signed. I’ll talk about the trust signing later but I wanted to share a few steps and some other references to how you can generate your own key and also be able to sign and / or encrypt emails or files.

The GUI Front-End

There are a number of tools to help you generate and manage your PGP keys. I suggest seahorse on gnome or kgpg on KDE. You can also use the command line equivalent on either system, which will be standard between the two. (note: there are also solutions for OS X and Windows, but I won’t get into those.)

First we’ll install the GUI front-end to go with the pre-installed GnuPG back-end.

(for gnome)

sudo aptitude install seahorse

or

sudo aptitude install gpa

or (for kde)

sudo aptitude install kgpg

Creating The Key

Now that we have one of these installed we’ll launch the front-end and start creating a key. In this example I’ll refer to seahorse but the steps should fairly easily transfer to the other two applications.

Applications > Accessories > Passwords and Encryption Keys

Select “Key” from the File Menu and “Create New Key (ctrl-N)”

This will prompt you with a selection between PGP and SSH. In this case we’ll want PGP.

The next window will prompt you for your full name, email address and comment. It is generally recommended to use your full legal name (not nicknames or aliases) and your primary valid email address. I suggest leaving the comment section empty.

You may want to select the “Advanced key options” button and set a higher key strength. The default type DSA Elgamal of 2048 is a very powerful key strength but it does support up to 4096 as well. Personally I left it at the default of 2048 as this is plenty powerful in itself.

You can also optionally select a date that this key will expire. Unless you know a reason why you’d want to do that (sometimes for temporary project-based keys, etc) you can safely set it to not-expire.

When you hit “Create” it will ask you for a passphrase to bind to this key pair. Choose a good, solid, more-than-a-dozen character passphrase to make this even more solid. Your digital signature and key are only as strong as its weakest link which is the passphrase. If someone gets a hold of your passphrase they can make use of your private key, un-encrypt emails sent to you or appear to be you! Once you have entered the passphrase it will generate your key pair. Remember this passphrase because, without it, the key pair is useless!

Depending on the key strength and the speed of your machine this may take a while. You should see a progress bar on the screen while it processes a new key. Just be patient.

You now have a basic key that is capable of digitally signing and optionally encrypting emails or files. One great use of this is to digitally sign the Ubuntu Code of Conduct as outlined here.

Using the Key

For those of you that want to get started right away signing emails you may be interested in some of the extensions available for commonly used mail applications. Thunderbird has a great one with Enigmail. You can find it on the mozilla addons site or via the ubuntu repositories.

Evolution has PGP support built in which is also very good. You can find this in the Edit>Preferences. Where you should select the email account then go to Edit>Security. Here you should enter the PGP key ID and check all boxes under the PGP header, except “Do not sign meeting requests”.

Now this tutorial is getting a bit long so I’ll have to expand this next time and explain expanding your key with your alternate email addresses, keysigning parties, etc.

Until then I hope this helped a little bit.

Two major things to remember before you run off and start playing around. Remember your passphrase and back up your private key!!

Your public and private keys are found in ~/.gnupg/ . I suggest backing up this entire folder to an external USB. If you lose your private key the whole pair is useless. Even if you still have the public key and the passphrase the private key section is the most critical part of the process.

The Cousin Jacks singing The Eve of Christmas at the Informal Carol Service 2007 at Richard Lander School, Truro, Cornwall.

View the video here…

http://youtube.com/watch?v=8otmw5BjAG4

The Cousin Jack’s are a male voice choir made up of current pupils from Richard Lander School and conducted by Russell Pascoe. The idea of the Cousin Jacks choir is to entertain and enjoy traditional and not so traditional songs. Many of the songs are from fishing villages around the Cornish coast and others have been written for various seasons of the year. A cousin jack is always to be found singing at rugby matches, pubs and celebrations.

If you are male, went to Richard Lander School, find yourself singing boisterously at rugby matches, know most of the words to Lamorna and feel uncomfortable in the presence of inflatable sheep chances are you’re a Jack!

The Cousin Jacks will be having a reunion at

The Rising Sun
Mitchell Hill
Truro

On the 26 th of December at 8:00 pm.

Join us for a few songs and many beers. Bring old photo’s of yourself at school and we could pop them on the website and have old and new photo’s of people.