Running Linux, 5th Edition - Matthias Kalle Dalheimer [59]
Clocks
How can your screen be complete if it is unadorned by a little clock that tells you how much time you are wasting on customizing the screen's appearance? You can have a clock just the way you want it, square or round, analog or digital, big or small. You can even make it chime.
KDE contains a number of clocks , but usually you will want to run the small panel applet, as screen real estate is always at a premium, regardless of your screen resolution. The clock should appear by default at the bottom-right corner of your screen, in the confines of the panel (this is called a panel applet, or a small application that runs within the panel). If your distribution hasn't set up things this way, you can also right-click anywhere on the panel background and select Add to Panel → Applet → Clock from the menu, which will make the clock appear on the panel. If you'd rather have it somewhere else on the panel, you can right-click the small striped handle to the left of the clock, select Move from the context menu that appears, and move the clock with the mouse to the desired position. Other panel objects will automatically make room for the clock.
The panel clock applet has a number of different modes that you can select by right-clicking the clock itself and selecting Type as well as the desired mode from the context menu. There is a plain, a digital, an analog, and, most noteworthy, a fuzzy clock. The fuzzy clock is for everybody who doesn't like being pushed around by his clock. For example, if you run the fuzzy clock, it will show Middle of the week. If that is a bit too fuzzy for you, you can select Configure Clock → Appearance from the clock's context menu and select the degree of fuzziness here. For example, I am typing this at 9:53 A.M. on a Thursday, and the four degrees of fuzziness are Five to ten, Ten o' clock, Almost noon, and the aforementioned Middle of the week.
The clock applet also lets you configure the date and time format and the time zone to be used, as well as set the system clock (you need root permissions to do that; if you are logged in as a normal user, a dialog will pop up and ask you for the root password). You can even copy the current date and time in a number of formats into the system clipboard.
KGhostview: Displaying PostScript and PDF
Adobe PostScript, as a standard in its own right, has become one of the most popular formats for exchanging documents in the computer world. Many academics distribute papers in PostScript format. The Linux Documentation Project offers its manuals in PostScript form, among others. This format is useful for people who lack the time to format input, or who have sufficient network bandwidth for transferring the enormous files. When you create documents of your own using groff or TEX you'll want to view them on a screen before you use up precious paper resources by printing them.
KGhostview, a KDE application, offers a pleasant environment for viewing PostScript on the X Window System that, besides PostScript files, can also view files in Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF). However, there is another application that is specific for viewing PDF files in KDE as well, kpdf. KGhostview is really mostly a more convenient frontend to an older application, Ghostview, so you can also get the functionality described here with Ghostview. The user experience is much better with KGhostview, however, so that's what we describe here.
Using KGhostview is very simple: invoke it with the name of the file to be displayed — for instance:
eggplant$ kghostview article.ps
or simply click the icon of any PostScript or PDF file anywhere in KDE.
Since we are interested only with viewing existing files here, we do not need to concern ourselves much with the benefits of PostScript and PDF. Both can be considered standards to the extent that many programs write them (and a few can read them), but both have been defined by one company, Adobe Systems. PDF is a bit more