Tag Archives: KDE

Re-enabling KDE touch pad

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As I wrote in an earlier post, the ambient light button on HP EliteBooks is per default mapped to switch off the touch pad. Since it’s placed right next to the function keys that increase or decrease the screen brightness, it happens quite often that the key is hit by accident. If you’re running KDE, hitting Fn+F11 not only switches… Read more »

Fixing HP EliteBook ambient button

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The button that is supposed to toggle the ambient light sensor on HP EliteBooks 8440p and 8460p per default switches off the touch pad. That is because Fn+F11 (scancode 0x33), which is the ambient light button, is incorrectly mapped to KEY_TOUCHPAD_OFF (keycode 193) in kernel. To remap the scancode to another keycode, you can use setkeycodes. An appropriate choice for… Read more »

Inserting arbitrary unicode characters to kwrite

While you can normally insert arbitrary unicode characters to any X11 application using Ctrl-Shift-u and four hex digits, it doesn’t work in kwrite or kate. Instead you’d have to press F7 to switch to command line and type in For example, to get the degree symbol (Unicode: U+00B0) you’d type in ‘char 176’ (176 being 0xB0 converted do decimal).

KDE multi-monitor display settings are lost on logout

There are quite a few bug reports on the kde bug tracking system about kde losing display settings on logout (e.g. Bug 183143). But since this problem has been present for a couple of years and is still existing in the latest version of KDE (i.e. 4.8.5 at this writing), here’s a workaround: Add a parameter called StartupCommands to the… Read more »

fish kioslave and “Could not enter folder” error

The kioslave fish:/ enables you to access remote files through ssh, even if sftp is not installed on the remote host. It’s much more convenient than its cousin sftp:/, e.g. because dolphin remembers file associations etc. Unfortunately, fish:/ requires perl. It copies a perl script to the remote host and executes it there. So if you run into an error… Read more »

KDE global shortcuts daemon stealing shortcuts (aka Netbeans Ctrl+Shift+I doesn’t work any more)

If Netbeans’ keyboard shortcut for fixing import statements (or any other shortcut) stops working, it could be the KDE global shortcuts daemon interfering12. Per default, Ctrl+Shift+I is bound to Kopete’s read message function, so if Kopete runs in background, Netbeans doesn’t catch the shortcut. Quick Fix: Close Kopete or simply remove the global shortcut. To check, if the kglobalaccel daemon… Read more »

Okular uses ridiculous amounts of memory

Especially on large pdf files, okular tends to occupy insane amounts of memory. That’s because already rendered pages are kept in the cache for faster revisit and as you scroll quickly through a large pdf (let’s assume a couple hundred pages), okular can easily occopy Gigabytes of RAM for a few MB sized pdf file. The problem is existing for… Read more »

Hack: How to disable recently used items list

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Quite a few applications use ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel to keep track of a user’s most recent files. Unfortunately, not every application offers customization options to disable this list. One possible solution, granted, a quite hacky one, is to clear recently-used.xbel and revoke a user’s permission to edit it again. First, remove and re-create the file to clear it You can then edit… Read more »