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labeling on your keys, but quickly changing layouts may already be helpful if you are regularly moving in different worlds such as some of the authors of this book do. To turn on this feature, go to the Keyboard Layout page in the Regional & Accessibility group and check the Enable keyboard layouts box. Then select the Active layouts that you plan to use among the Available layouts. Once you click on Apply, a little flag button will appear on the right-hand side of the panel (in the so-called system tray); clicking on this flag lets you change keyboard layouts on the fly.

There is much more to say about using the KDE desktop, but we'll let you explore it yourself. Besides the obvious and intuitive features, there are also some that are not so obvious but are very useful nevertheless, so be sure to check the documentation at http://www.kde.org/documentation/index.html.

Figure 3-3. Configuring the language of the KDE desktop

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[*] Some distributions might put the KDE programs elsewhere, such as in /usr/bin.

[*] If by now you are wondering about the strange spelling of many terms in KDE, think about the first letter of the desktop's name.

KDE Applications

Thousands of programs are available for KDE. They range from basic utilities (such as konsole, the terminal emulator, and OClock, a rudimentary clock) to editors, programming aids, games, and multimedia applications . The most we can provide here is a tiny slice of the software available for KDE. In this section, we'll present those applications that all KDE users should know how to use. These aren't necessarily the most exciting programs out there, but they should certainly be part of your toolbox.

There are many, many more KDE applications than the few we can list here. You will make the acquaintance of some of them, such as KWord, the word processor, and Kontact, the personal information manager and mail user agent (and much else), elsewhere in this book. But others haven't found space in this book, so you should search through your favorite Linux archive for more exciting KDE programs; there are thousands of them to discover.

Also remember that if there really is no KDE program for a task you have to solve, you can always resort to one of the classic X applications, if available. These do not look as nice and integrate as well, but they still work on a KDE desktop.

konsole: Your Home Base

Let's start our exploration of X applications with the workhorse that you might be spending a lot of your time with in the terminal. This is simply a window that contains a Unix shell. It displays a prompt, accepts commands, and scrolls like a terminal.

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Tip

Traditionally, xterm was the classic Unix terminal emulator. It has been superseded by konsole in the KDE desktop environment.

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Perhaps you are struck by the irony of buying a high-resolution color monitor, installing many megabytes of graphics software, and then being confronted by an emulation of an old VT100 terminal. But Linux is much more than a point-and-click operating system. There are plenty of nice graphical applications, but a lot of the time you'll want to do administrative tasks, and a command-line interface still offers the most powerful tool for doing that. You'll get a glimpse of these tasks in Chapter 4.

So let's take look at a konsole window. Figure 3-4 shows one containing a few commands.

Figure 3-4. konsole window

Starting up konsole

You can start konsole in one of several ways, as with all KDE programs:

Start it from the panel, if you have a konsole icon there. This will be the default setup with most distributions.

Select it from the K menu, where konsole can be found in Utilities → System → Konsole.

Type Alt-F2, and then type konsole in the small command window that opens.

If you already have a konsole open, type konsole there and press Enter in order to get a whole new window running the program, or pull down the Session → New Shell screen.

When you open a konsole window, a "Tip of the Day" window will open that