Running Linux, 5th Edition - Matthias Kalle Dalheimer [56]
You can do more things with the background, but we'll leave it at that for now and look at something else: configuring the styles and colors of the windows .
Configuring window styles and colors. With normal window managers, you can configure the color of the window decorations, but not the window contents. KDE is different. Because KDE is an integrated desktop, color and other settings apply to both the window decorations painted by the window manager and the window contents painted by the applications. We'll now set off to configure a little bit of the appearance.
In the Control Center, open the Appearance & Themes group, and choose Colors. You'll see a preview window and a selection list where you can pick a color scheme. KDE works not by configuring individual colors but by defining so-called color schemes. This is because it does not make sense to change only one color; all colors must fit together to achieve a pleasing and eye-friendly look.
Although KDE lets you create your own color schemes, doing so is a task that requires some knowledge about color psychology and human vision. We therefore suggest that you pick one of the predefined color schemes. Check in the preview monitor whether you like what you see. Now comes the fun part: click the Apply button and watch how all running applications flicker a bit and suddenly change colors — without you having to restart them. Although Windows users tend to take this for granted, it was never seen on Unix before KDE.
The same feature applies to other settings. For example, open the Appearance & Themes group and choose Style. Here, you can select among a large number of so-called styles. The styles determine how the user interface elements are drawn—for example, as in Windows (style MS Windows 9x), as in Motif (style Motif), as on an SGI workstation (style SGI), or even something original such as the "Light" styles or the all-time KDE favorites "Plastik" and "Keramik."[*] You can change this setting by clicking Apply and watch your running applications change their style. The same goes, by the way, for the fonts that you can select on the Font page.
Internationalization. There are many more things to configure in KDE, but we cannot go through all the options here. Otherwise there would not be much space left for other topics in this book. But there's one more thing that we'd like to show you. You will especially like this if English is not your native language or if you frequently converse in another language.
Go to the Country → Region & Language page in the Regional & Accessibility group (see Figure 3-3). Here, you can select the country settings and the language in which your KDE desktop and the KDE applications should be running. Currently, KDE lets you choose from more than 80 country settings and languages. Note that you need to have a language module installed in order to be able to select a particular language. You can either download those from the KDE FTP server (as explained earlier) or install them from your distribution medium.
You might be wondering why you can select more than one language. The reason is that the KDE programs are translated by volunteers, and not all the applications are translated at the same time. Thus, a particular application might not be available in the language that you have chosen as your first language (the topmost one in the Language list). In this case, the next language is chosen automatically for that application, and if no translation is available for this application in that language either, the next language is chosen, and so on. If all else fails, KDE uses U.S. English, which always is present.
While speaking about different languages, it might also be worthwhile to briefly go into keyboard layouts. Most European languages, even those based on the Latin alphabet, have special characters that are either not available on other keyboards or are just awkward to type. KDE comes with a nifty little program that lets you quickly change keyboard layouts. Of course, it cannot change the