Those purists still love KDE 3.5, and many of them continue to use the supported version of it called Trinity Desktop Environment. Others, however, mainly just preferred the KDE 3.5 look over the current Plasma Air appearance. If that is the case, Plasma gives you the flexibility to make your KDE 4 desktop look like KDE 3.5.

The Panel

In terms of functionality, much of the KDE panel has not changed. You still have a “K” button, a pager, a task manager, a system tray, and a clock. The default Plasma appearance, however, looks radically different. Furthermore, the Kickoff menu is big and clunky compared to the simple KDE 3.5 menu.

To change the panel’s appearance, do the following:

1. Download the “Vintage” Plasma theme (Unfortunately, there is a problem with the packing of this theme on KDE-Look.org. I repacked it and have made it available here.)
2. Unpack the theme and copy it to your desktop theme folder: /hom/[username]/.kde/share/apps/desktoptheme
3. Open “System Settings”
4. Choose “Workspace Appearance”
5. Click “Desktop Theme”
6. Choose “KVintage”
7. Click “Apply”.

The Desktop

The default KDE 4 desktop uses folderview widgets and icons that are also widgets. If you prefer a desktop that functions like the KDE 3 desktop, KDE 4 can handle that too.

1. Right click on the desktop
2. Click “Desktop Settings”
3. If necessary, click “Unlock Widgets”
4. For “Layout” change it from “Desktop” to “Folder View”
5. Click “OK”

You should now have a more traditional-looking and functioning desktop.

The K Menu

The kickoff menu is very robust with a great deal of functionality, but if you want the simple menu from KDE 3, simply remove the application launcher widget and replace it with the traditional one.

1. Right click on the “K” button on the panel
2. Click “Remove this application launcher”
3. Right click again on the panel and click “Add widgets”
4. Drag the “Application Launcher Menu” widget to the panel

You should now have the traditional application launcher menu from KDE 3.5.

The Icons

The default KDE icon set is called Oxygen, but you can use whatever icons you want, as long as they are properly configured for KDE4’s structure. Fortunately, someone has repackaged the KDE3 CrystalSVG icon theme.

1. Download the icon theme manually
2. Open “System Settings”
3. Click “Application Appearance” and then “Icons”
4. Click “Install Theme File”
5. Locate the icon set you just download and select it
6. Choose the icon theme from the list and click “Apply”

Application and Window Decoration Appearance

Most of the old KDE 3 window decorations and styles are still around in KDE 4. To use them, all you have to do is select them in System Settings. To change the style:

1. Click “Application Appearance”
2. Next to “Widget style” select the theme you want, “Plastique” for example
3. Click “Apply”

To change the window decoration:

1. In System Settings, choose “Workspace Appearance”
2. Choose “Window Decorations”
3. Select the theme you want, such as “Plastik”

The File Manager

One of the most monumental changes from KDE 3 to KDE 4 was the introduction of Dolphin, a new file manager to relieve Konqueror of one its multiple responsibilities. To have a true KDE 3.5 experience, you will need to make Konqueror your default file manager.

1. Open “System Settings” and choose “Default Applications”
2. Select “File Manager” from the left pane
3. Select “Konqueror” and click “Apply”

Once you have all of these changes in place, you may start to see KDE 4 in a different light. Although many features under the hood have changed, it is still possible to get the KDE 3.5 look and feel back on your desktop.

Related Posts:

• Sprinkle Some Eye Candy on your KDE Desktop
• How to Give Any KDE Desktop An Ubuntu Makeover
• 7 Ways to Beautify Your KDE 4 Desktop
• How to Use KDE Plasma Activities

I have spoken to many people who dislike KDE solely based on its default appearance, the Air/Oyxgen set of styles and themes. Some have even argued that it looks too much like Windows (although evidence strongly suggests that Windows 7 mimicked KDE, rather than the other way around). What those people may not realize is that you can make KDE look as much like Gnome or any other desktop environment as you want.

The customizations in this guide are just examples. They will not give an exact Unity or Gnome appearance, as most people change those defaults anyway. Instead, this example will use some of the common customizations that Ubuntu and Gnome users often apply.

The Desktop Theme

KDE-Look has a plethora of desktop themes you can use. To change your theme, do the following:

1. Open “System Settings” from the kickoff menu (or press Alt+F2 and type it)
2. Click “Workspace Appearance”
3. Click “Desktop Theme” on the left-hand pane
4. Click “Get New Themes” at the bottom
5. Choose whatever theme you want and click “Install”. For this example, I have chosen the “Ambiance” theme.
6. Click “Apply”

The Window Decoration

Since you are already in Workspace settings, now is a good time to change the window decoration.

1. Click “Window Decorations” from the left-hand pane.
2. Click “Get New Decorations”
3. Following the same example, search for Ambiance Aurorae and click “Install”
4. Choose the decoration theme and click “Apply”.

If you want to really be like Ubuntu/Mac OS X, you can move the window buttons to the left side:

1. Click “Configure Buttons”
2. Check the box labeled “Use custom title bar button positions”
3. Simply drag each button type to the left in the order that you want them.

Application Appearance

Getting the application appearance you want is a little more tricky. That is because KDE does not currently offer users the ability to install new styles from within System Settings. Therefore, before you choose a style, you will need to make sure the one you want is installed. You have two options: 1. You can install the actual GTK style that you want and use it, or 2. Find an actual KDE or Qtcurve style that matches the one you want.

If you decide to go with the Qtcurve option, you can download something like Ambiance-like. Download it and extract it to the folder of your choice. To install it, do the following:

1. Open “System Settings”
2. Click “Application Appearance”
3. Choose Qtcurve and click “Configure” (If you do not have Qtcurve installed, it is probably in your distribution’s software repository)
4. In the “Presets” section, choose “Import”
5. Find the Ambiance-like theme (Ambiance-like.qtcurve) and then click “OK”
6. Click “Apply”
7. Click the “Colors” button in the left-hand panel
8. Choose “Import Scheme”
9. Locate the Ambiance colors (Ambiance-like.colors) and click “OK”
10. Click “Apply”

Alternatively, you can use the Ambiance color scheme from KDE-Look.

Panel and Launcher

In most distributions, the KDE panel is at the bottom and is rather large. To move it to the top:

1. Right click on the panel and click “Unlock widgets”
2. Click the cashew button on the far right
3. Click and hold the “Screen Edge” button and drag the panel to the top.
4. Click and hold the “Height” button to make it the size you want

KDE can use a global menu that works for KDE, Qt, and GTK apps. To use it:

1. Click the cashew again and click “Add widgets”
2. Choose “Window Menubar” and drag it to the panel

You have a couple of options for launchers. You can either use a KDE-native launcher like Daisy or Fancy Tasks, or you can use a separate launcher program like Docky (mono-based but very reliable), Plank (fast, light-weight next-gen Docky), AWN (robust and powerful), or Cairo Dock (all about options).

Icons

KDE uses a slightly different icon theme system from Gnome and Ubuntu. Therefore, it may not be the best idea to use those themes directly, but they will still work. The alternative is that you can find one specifically modified for KDE. Faenza-Cupertino is a very popular iconset for Ubuntu users, and KFaenza is an excellent KDE version.

To install it:

1. Open “System Settings”
2. Click “Application Appearance”
3. Choose “Icons” from the left-hand pane
4. Click “Get New Themes”
5. Search for “KFaenza”
6. Click “Install”
7. Select the icon theme and click “Apply”

Mixing and Matching

You are certainly not limited to the examples I have shown. You can mix and match whatever you like to get your KDE desktop looking exactly the way you want.

Related Posts:

• How to Get Great Looking Fonts in KDE
• How to Make KDE 4 Look Like KDE 3
• 7 Ways to Beautify Your KDE 4 Desktop
• How to Install QtCurve in KDE

1. Great List of Android Widgets For Tweaking And Monitoring Your Device Settings [Part 1]

2. Android Widgets Series: Great List Of Clock Widgets To Help You Tell The Time [Part 2]

1. Default Android Widget

Firstly, the stock version of Android comes with a few widgets pre-installed. These widgets are not as nice or as feature-full as some of the other examples in this article, however if you simply wish to scan the month or your upcoming appointments then it is perfectly adequate.

The main problem with the above widgets is that it only shows the first event of the day and the remaining events are obscured. If you wish to have a scrollable list of widgets, you may wish to try the following widgets.

2. Android Agenda Widget

Although Android Agenda Widget does not have the slickest UI, it is still one of the more popular widget apps because it syncs appointments and tasks from a variety of sources including, Google, Activesync, Touchdown exchange, Astrid, SSI gTasks, Dato GTask, Google Task Organizer, Got To and Do.

If you wish to enable all the additional functions of this widget, then download the Plus version.

3. Calendar GO Widget

If you are not overly concerned about having a boat-load of functionality, but do want some nice eye candy, then Calendar GO Widget is highly recommended. There are three widgets to choose from, a month view, an agenda view, and a daily events view.

According to the reviews, this widget displays all the calendars (from Google Calendar) and does not allow the user to select which calendars to view.

Calendar GO Widget requires the home screen replacement GO Launcher EX to be installed.

4. Simple Calendar Widget

If you prefer a minimalist interface then Simple Calendar Widget is the best choice for you. This widget features a number of different styles, skins and other customisation options depending on whether you prefer a lighter or darker theme or whether you want to donate more or less screen real-estate.

5. Laik Agenda Widget Calendar

Developer Laik makes a popular calendar widget which takes up very little space but at the same time displays a large portion of information. Additionally, unlike some of the other calendar widgets the different Google Calendars are colour coded. Just don’t expect a lot of customisation options from this widget.

If you wish to support the developer, then consider opting for the donation version of the Laik Agenda Widget.

6. Smooth Calendar

This calendar widget is ideal for those who do not want to sacrifice a lot of screen real-estate. You can customise the size, look, and feel of the widget to make it “smoothly” fit into your home screen.

Which agenda widget is your favourite?

This is my last article in the Android Widget Series. Let us know in the comments what you thought of this series and if you wish to see similar series in the future.

Image credit: DafneCholet

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Often, we have to install several apps to keep our phone clean and stable. Apps such as App to SD, battery monitor, cache cleaner are examples of apps that we install. Rarely do you find an app that combines all these features into one and still does not take up much memory and resources. Ranging from battery monitoring, traffic bandwidth, task killing, cache cleaning to power control widgets, ZDbox has them all.

Battery Info

The battery info shows you the state of your battery, its temperature, voltage, health etc. During charge, it will show you the amount of time remaining for the battery to be fully charged.

Mobile Traffic

If your mobile plan comes with a limited data usage, The mobile traffic feature allows you to monitor the amount of data you have already used. You can also set the data limits, the billing date and whether it should show you a warning when you are about to reach the data limit. In addition, you can also check which application is using the most data traffic.

Do No Disturb

Have you ever wish that your phone can auto-switch to Do Not Disturb mode at your sleeping hours so people won’t be able to call and disturb you? This Do Not Disturb mode does just that. You can set the start and end hour, the day of the week and the setting (like flight mode, vibrate, silent etc) to activate.

App lock

Most of the time, you will have to pay to get such a feature in your phone, but it is now available for free in ZDbox.

In app lock mode, you can select the apps that you want to protect. When the app lock mode is on, you will need to enter a password to use the protected app.

Task Killer

Task killers app is abundant in the Android market, but it is still good to see it included in ZDbox. While you won’t need to kill any task most of the time, there will be times where an app misbehaves and causes your system to slow down. It is always handy to have an task killer app around.

Uninstaller

What I love about this Uninstaller feature is the ability to batch uninstall apps. You can select the apps to uninstall and tap on the “Uninstall selected” button. It will then proceed to uninstall the selected apps.

App to SD and Cache Cleaner

ZDbox detects if your apps can be moved to SD card and help you to do so. The cache cleaner clears your cache to free up memory and system resources. These two features are particularly useful for the older low end Android phone.

Widgets

If you think that is all in ZDbox, you are wrong. ZDbox also comes with several widgets that you can use. You can place the Task Killer widget to provide a one-click access to kill all tasks, or the power control widget to provide quick shortcuts to different functions.

Personally, I enjoyed using ZDbox, because it is easy to use and does not take up too much space. Right after installing this app, I am able to uninstall several other apps (which have the same features) to free up even more space. Best of all, an app that comes with so many features (some of them is even premium grade) is free. This is definitely a steal.

Don’t wait, go get it now.

ZDbox (market link)

Related Posts:

• 8 Useful Tips To Get The Best Out Of Your Android Phone
• Android Power Monitoring At Its Best
• Android Widget Series: Agenda Widgets To Keep Your Life On Track [Part 3]
• How to Customize Android Lockscreen For Maximum Productivity

Here are several ways that you can use to customize your Android lockscreen for maximum productivity.

Note: Some of the custom ROMs (such as Cyanogenmod 7 and MIUI) come with the ability to modify your lockscreen. We will not be covering those ROMs in this article.

1. No Lock

If you find it a hassle to unlock your phone everytime, the best way is to disable the lockscreen completely. No Lock does just that. After installed, it disables your lockscreen and you will find yourself at the homescreen everytime you turn on the phone.

If you have set a passcode for your phone, this app will disable that as well.

No Lock (market link)

2. Lockscreen Calendar

The lockscreen calendar displays the calendar agenda on your lockscreen so you don’t have to unlock your phone, fire up the calendar app just to see what you have in schedule for the day.

The usage is pretty simple.

1. Install and open the app.

2. Choose the calendar to display on your lockscreen.

3. Press the “Update now” button.

Note: This app doesn’t work on Samsung Galaxy 2 and HTC sense lockscreen.

Lockscreen Calendar

3. Simply lockscreen

Simply Lockscreen is a lock screen replacement app that comes with plenty of customization option. You can get it to display time, weather, location, battery, music player, current song, calendar events and volume settings. It also supports custom backgrounds, themes so you can choose your favorite wallpaper as the lockscreen image.

On the hind side, the app is rather buggy. Some of the customization don’t work as intended, especially the lockbar is always in the wrong position. Also, you have to reboot (everytime) for the customization to work.

Simply Lockscreen (market link)

4. Lockmenu

Instead of turning your lockscreen into an informational panel, the Lockmenu app turns your lockscreen into an application shortcut panel. You can configure up to eights sliders to appear on the lockscreen. When you slide on one, it will immediately bring you to the app.

Lockmenu is available for $1.99 in the market. There is also an ad-supported version that is free of charge.

Lockmenu | Lockmenu free (Market link)

5. LSMemo

The LSMemo app is an interesting app that allows you to place memo on the lockscreen. You can add your own message, like reminder, to do list etc and configure the color, font size of the message.

You can also choose the image to appear in the lockscreen. This means that you can place the photo of your baby and write memo on it.

In addition, you can get it to rotate the image regularly so you will see different image everytime.

LSMemo is available in the market for $0.99. There is also a free, but limited version.

LSMemo | LSMemo free (market link)

6. WidgetLocker Lockscreen

WidgetLocker Lockscreen is a powerful lockscreen replacement app that allows you to fully configure what to appear in the lockscreen. You can add apps shortcut, slider, widgets and place them in the order you want. You can also resize the widget and style up the slider with various themes.

In short, this is easily the most customizable lockscreen app in the Android market.

WidgetLocker Lockscreen is available for $1.99 in the market

WidgetLocker Lockscreen

7. LockGo

LockGo allows you to place RSS, calendar, task manager, weather, SMS and several widgets on your lockscreen. All the widgets are scrollable and you can tap on it to read the content, without having to unlock the phone.

The setting up is pretty easy. Just tap on the toolbar icon and select “Widgets”. The list of widget will appear for you to add to the screen.

LockGo is free and is available in the market.

LockGo (market link)

8. Flyscreen

Similar to LockGo, Flyscreen allows you to add multiple widgets to the lockscreen. What makes it different is that there are a lot more widgets that you can download and use. Be it the news, RSS feed, twitter, facebook, weather, sports or almost any web services, you can add them to your lockscreen.

Flyscreen is free and is available in the market.

LockScreen

What other ways do you use to maximize the use of your lockscreen?

Related Posts:

• 8 Useful Tips To Get The Best Out Of Your Android Phone
• 4 More Distraction Deterring Android Apps To Increase Your Productivity
• 4 Android Apps To Improve Your Productivity
• Android Widget Series: Agenda Widgets To Keep Your Life On Track [Part 3]

Basic Clock Widgets

The following list of widgets are simple ones that display the date and time on your device’s home screen.

1. Retro Clock Widget: This widget is based on the classic mechanical flipping clocks often seen in train stations.

2. SiMi Clock Widget: This is another minimalist clock widget that displays the date and time on the home screen, but unlike the retro clock widget, it is purely textual.

3. Digital Clock Widget: This widget is quite simplistic and made to resemble the one from the iOS lock screen. However, it does have a few additional features including the ability to customise its look.

Advanced Clock Widgets

This list of widgets include ones that have additional information alongside the date and time. Such information could include the battery or network status and the weather.

1. Advanced Clock Widget: This is a simple text based widget (i.e. without fancy graphics) that displays a lot of useful information including your phone’s battery status, the network operator, the Wi-Fi network name, multiple world clocks with time zone support, current location, weather data, next alarm and total uptime.

2. Make Your Clock Widget Beta: This widget is quite different from the rest. Although it has most of the features of the other clock widgets, it is unique because it allows you to customise its look in an infinite number of ways from a simple minimalistic text-based clock widget to a full-blown one with weather, battery, and other information.

3. Animated Weather Widget, Clock: This popular widget displays the time alongside the weather forecast with live wallpapers. The video effects feature cloudiness, rain and snow which provide a vivid sensation of current and/or future weather conditions.

4. Fancy Widgets: This is a beautiful and highly customisable set of widgets that displays the clock, date, weather, moon phase calculation and alarm settings.

World Clock Widgets

This list of widgets are useful if you travel between multiple time zones or have to keep track of the time from different places around the world.

1. World Clock & Widget: This widget is no frills and simply displays the time and location of the places you select in an unobtrusive manner.

2. World Weather Clock Widget: If you need to know the weather in addition to the time of different locations then use this widget.

3. Perfect World Clock: In addition to displaying the times of different places, the widgets in this app switch between a black and chrome colour to differentiate between pm and am, respectively. Hence, this widget makes it easy to keep track of what time it is in other parts of the world.

Fun Clock Widgets

This final list of widgets are like screensavers, fun to look at but not terribly useful.

1. Mickey Mouse Clock Widget: This is a cute little widget that features Mickey Mouse on the face of an analogue clock.

2. Pixel Art Clock Widget: This widget is a decorative clock displayed in a pixelated form.

3. Art Clock: This widget is for the artistic folk, but it looks great on most home screens.

Which type of clock widget do you have on your home screen?

In next week’s edition of the Android Widgets series I will be looking at a variety of calendar and agenda widgets.

Related Posts:

• Android Widget Series: Agenda Widgets To Keep Your Life On Track [Part 3]
• ZDbox Is A Powerful Toolbox That Keeps Your Android Phone In Good State
• How to Customize Android Lockscreen For Maximum Productivity
• Great List of Android Widgets For Tweaking And Monitoring Your Device Settings [Part 1]

In this series of articles, I will highlight groups of widgets that are useful for different tasks. This first article in the series features widgets that are useful for monitoring or tweaking Android settings.

Note: Most of these widgets also have “pro” or “extended” versions with more features, but which also costs money.

Adding Widgets

To add a widget to your Android device, simply long press anywhere on your home screen and select “widget”.

Widgets For Toggling Settings

A smartphone has a number of features that are not always necessary. For example, unless you are in an area with WiFi, having your WiFi radio turned on is a waste of battery as it will constantly try and find a new network. On the other hand, it is a pain to have to constantly dig through menus to disable selected radios. Therefore, putting toggle widgets (widgets that activate or deactivate particular functions) on your home screen alleviates this pain.

1. Free Power Widget: This puts a widget bar on your home screen that allows you to monitor and toggle a multitude of settings, including the following:

• USB
• Airplane
• WiFi
• Bluetooth (only Android 2.x)
• Silent
• Lock Pattern (Only Android 2.2 or lower)
• Brightness Toggle
• Brightness Slider
• Sync (only Android 2.x)
• Orientation
• GPS
• 2G/3G
• Stay awake
• Always On
• Screen Timeout
• WiFi Lock

2. Toggle Widgets Pack: This pack of widgets places individual icons on your home screen (unlike the above widget bar) and it allows you to toggle the following settings:

• Airplane mode
• Bluetooth
• GPS (Not one click since Android API does not support this)
• Reboot (Requires root access)
• Silent mode
• Vibrate
• WiFi

3. CurveFish Widgets: The developer CurveFish has created individual widgets for toggling the following settings:

SilentMode, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, AutoRotate, Brightness Level, 2G to 3G, APN (data), AutoSync and LockPattern

You can also download the OnOff Widgets Pack (from the same developer) which features a collection of the following toggle widgets:

• Airplane mode
• APN (data)
• AutoRotate
• AutoSync
• Bluetooth
• Brightness
• GPS
• LockScreen
• Network 2G/3G
• Screen timeout
• Silent mode
• WiFi

Battery Monitor Widgets

It is strange that Google does not provide an adequate application for monitoring the battery level of your Android handset. There is a battery icon in the notification bar, however it is not very precise. Fortunately, there are a number of widgets that display the battery level of your device on your home screen:

1. BatteryLife
   
2. Circle Battery Widget
   
3. Battery Watcher Widget
   
4. Battery Widget
   
5. Battery Solo Widget
   
6. Battery Monitor Widget: The above widgets are all fairly basic as they merely display the current battery level. In contrast, this widget gives you complete battery monitoring through a notification icon, battery history, graphs, and alarms.

Conclusion

In the next part of this Android widget series, we will discuss the various clock widgets in the market.

Image credit: Johan Larsson

Related Posts:

• Android Widget Series: Agenda Widgets To Keep Your Life On Track [Part 3]
• ZDbox Is A Powerful Toolbox That Keeps Your Android Phone In Good State
• How to Customize Android Lockscreen For Maximum Productivity
• Android Widgets Series: Great List Of Clock Widgets To Help You Tell The Time [Part 2]

1. Conditional Widgets

As its name implies, Conditional Widgets is a plugin that allows you to define a conditional rule for each and every widget.

After you have downloaded and activated it, go to your Widgets page and add the widgets you want as per normal. What is different now is that within each widget, there is an option for you to configure when the widget should appear in the blog (refer to the screenshot below).

You can get it to show/hide on the Home page, certain categories, or even certain pages. It also supports sub-categories and sub-pages. You just need to define the rule for the parent category/page and their sub-categories and sub-pages will follow suit.

One thing though, it does not allow you to configure on a per-post basis.

2. Widget Logic

Widget Logic is less intuitive than Conditional Widget, but it gives you the flexibility to define where the widget should appear. Widget Logic make use of the WordPress conditional tags to determine where the widget should appear. For example, if you want the widget to appear on a post with post id 46, you place the conditional tag is_single(46) in the Widget Logic field.

Widget Logic

3. Section Widgets

The way that Section Widgets works is slightly different from the above two, but it is also the most powerful among the three. Other than the conditional logic, Section Widgets also allows you to create a tabbed sidebar without having to write a single code.

After the installation, go to “Themes -> Section Widget“. This is where you can customize the look and feel of the tabbed interface. It comes with 25 UI themes for you to choose. If none of them caught your eyes, you can even define your own style.

In the Widget section, instead of adding a conditional logic to each and every widget, you will have to add the “Section” widget to the respective sidebar in order for it to appear. Each Section widget comes with two part. The upper part is where you define the condition (which page/category to appear) and the lower part is the HTML code to display.

To add a tabbed widget, drag and drop the “Section (tabbed)” widget to the respective sidebar. Similarly, the top section is where you define the logic and the bottom is where you create tabs and add content to it.

While Section Widget is very powerful, it does have one caveat – it doesn’t integrate with other widgets. If you have a custom widget (say the custom menu) that you want to show conditionally on your blog, you won’t be able to do that with Section Widget.

Section widget

Which method do you use to add conditional widgets to your WordPress site?

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That is only one part. The next issue is the installing of new plasmoids. I downloaded some plasmoids from kde-apps.org and I have completely no ideas how to install it (I am still a newbie in KDE). I double click on it. It doesn’t work. I drag it to the widget section. It doesn’t work either. Once again, I have to google for help.

If you are, just like me, having difficulty in installing your plasmoids, here is how you can do it:

1. Download the plasmoid to your home folder. It should have a .plasmoid extension.

2. Click the Panel Tool Box (on the right bottom corner) and select Add Widgets.

3. Click “Get New Widget -> Install widget from local file“.

4. Under the type of widget to install, select “Plasmoid: Native Plasma Widget” and click Next.

5. Lastly, navigate to the place where you store your plasmoids and select it. Click Finish.

That’s it.

Install via command line

In some cases, installing plasmoid via the above method doesn’t work. The best way is to install via the command line.

plasmapkg -u widget-file-name.plasmoid

If that still doesn’t work, try the following method:

1. Extract the plasmoids to a new folder (right click the plasmoids and select “extract to”) in your home directory. You should see a “contents” folder and a meta.desktop file.

2. Open Konsole.

3. type in the following command:

plasmapkg -i plasmoid-folder-name

where the plasmoid-folder-name is the name of the folder that you extracted the plasmoid to.

If the installation is successful, you should find the plasmoid in your widget library. You can then drag it to the desktop to use it.

It is easy, only if you know the way to do it.

Related Posts:

• How to Integrate Google Gadgets With Plasma in Kubuntu
• 7 Ways to Beautify Your KDE 4 Desktop
• How to customize your KDE desktop with KDE-Look.org
• How to Make KDE 4 Look Like KDE 3

1. Plasma Themes

The plasma theme engine is quite straightforward. It controls the look and feel of the KDE panel, the widgets/applets, the Krunner command interface, and any pop-ups from the panel or widgets. To change the theme:

1. Open System Settings (systemsettings)
2. Click Workspace Appearance
3. Click “Desktop Theme”

You can then select the theme you want. To download other themes from KDE-Look.org, just click “Get New Themes…”

Best of all, with Plasma, you can mix and match any themes you want, add your own components, or create your own new themes. To do so, click the “Details” tab. Each theme item will have an associated source. In the drop-down menu, select the theme source or select “File” to choose one you have created. Finally, tick the “More” box to save your new theme or even export it to share with others.

2. KWin Themes and Desktop Effects

With your new sexy looking desktop widgets and panel, you now need to match your window decorations. KDE’s window manager, KWin, has a number of themes you can choose. While still in “Workspace Appearance”, click the “Window Decorations” button on the left side. From there you can choose the decoration you want, customize the buttons, configure shadows (for some decorations), or click “Get New Decorations…” to find user-created gems.

KWin also has a plethora of desktop effects you can use, depending on your video card. In System Settings, click “Desktop Effects” and choose the effects you desire.

TIP: If you ever need to suspend desktop effects, simply press Alt+Shift+F12.

3. Wallpapers, Slideshows, and Viruses

A wallpaper can make or break a desktop. With KDE, you can choose a simple color, patterns, images, an entire slideshow, or other desktop effects, such as the “virus” or “globe” options. To choose the wallpaper you want, right click on the desktop and click “Desktop Settings”. If you have your own wallpaper you want to add, click “Open…” You can also click “Get New…” to find more wallpapers.

TIP: Make sure you choose the right positioning for your wallpaper. If it already has the right aspect ratio but not the right size, choose “Scaled”. If it has neither, choose “Scaled and Cropped.”

4. Icon Sets

Manually changing an entire icon set can be tricky in KDE, but it is easy to download one from KDE-Look.org and install it. Just follow these steps:

1. Download the icon set from KDE-Look.org
2. Open System Settings
3. Click “Application Appearance”
4. Click “Icons”
5. Click “Install Theme File…”

You can also download a set from within the dialog by clicking on “Get New Themes…”

5. Widgets

Plasma has built-in support for desktop and panel widgets. In addition to native Plasma widgets (plasmoids), it also supports Google Gadgets and many other widget types. To place new widgets, right click on the desktop or panel and click “Add Widgets…”

6. The Art of the Panel

You have full control over the KDE panel. You can resize it, move it, hide it, and more. To modify it, make sure your widgets are unlocked and click the little cashew at the end of the panel. This will open a configuration pop-up.

TIP: Want windows to cover your panel but do not want to hide it all the time? Click “More Settings” and choose “Windows can cover”. A maximized window will hide the panel, but moving your mouse to the edge of the screen will raise it, just like a hidden panel.

7. Folder View and Shelf

Clutter is something that has always plagued Windows, Mac, and Linux desktops. The desktop is probably better described as a workspace, and people want drag images, files, and other items onto it. Over time, however, it gets very messy. With Folder View, you can still have items on your desktop, but you can keep them organized in boxes and categories. With Shelf, you can have launchable icons for anything, organized in nice rows on your workspace.

Experiment and Create

KDE can be anything you want it to be. That freedom is what makes free and open source software so great. Try out new looks. Impress your friends, and share your creations.

Related Posts:

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KDE 4 offers an alternative to the traditional icons scattered all over the desktop with a Plasma widget called Shelf. Just like a shelf in a library, the shelf widget keeps files, folders, devices, and applications in order and easily accessible.

Creating a Shelf

There are several ways to create a shelf in KDE 4, providing maximum convenience and fluidity (Before beginning, make sure your widgets are unlocked – right click on the desktop and click “Unlock Widgets).

Add Widgets Dialog – The most basic way to add a shelf is to right click on the desktop and click “Add Widgets”. Next, type “shelf” in the search box. Finally, drag it to the desktop.

Using this method, the shelf will be empty by default, so click “Configure…” and then click “Add…” A menu will show you a list of various types of shelves available:

• favorites
• applications category
• places
• folder
• removable devices
• fixed devices
• system tools
• new documents
• open documents
• recent documents
• online contacts
• unread messages

After you select one and click “OK”, you are finished. The shelf will be populated with the icons you chose.

Add to Panel

To add a shelf to the panel, you can drag a desktop shelf to it, which creates an icon and accompanying menu. Alternatively, you can create a shelf directly by right clicking anywhere on the panel, navigating to “Panel Options”, and clicking “Add Widgets”.

Drag and Drog

Yet another easy way to create a shelf is to drag any folder to the desktop or panel. A menu will appear giving you three options: Folder View, Shelf, and Icon. Choose “Shelf”, and a shelf showing the contents of the folder will instantly appear, with no further configuration necessary.

Lancelot Menu

If you use the Lancelot menu widget, you can drag any one of its sections directly onto the desktop or panel to create a shelf.

Shelf inside a Shelf

Any shelf can also hold other shelves. For example, if you wanted to have your “Places” shelf and your “Removable Devices” shelf in the same widget, simply drag one onto the other. You can also drag a new shelf onto any existing one, or add multiple shelves within “Shelf Settings”. The new shelf will be appended to the current one, allowing you to navigate through them.

To remove a shelf from a widget containing more than one, right click on the title and click “Remove This”.

Additional Options

By default, the shelf widget has a “no click” feature, which is displayed in the form of a tiny “extender” icon on the right hand side of each shelf item. Move your mouse over the icon, and the shelf item will open without clicking. If you prefer good old-fashioned clicking:

1. Click the settings wrench icon
2. Click the “Advanced” side tab
3. Choose “Click to activate items”

KDE Plasma widgets also have shortcuts. For example, if you have a documents shelf icon on your panel, you can activate the menu using a shortcut. To use a shortcut, open the shelf settings and do the following:

1. Click the “Keyboard Shortcut” side tab
2. Click the button with the wrench icon that says “None”
3. Enter a key combination (such as Meta+D)

Now, anytime you press that keyboard shortcut, the shelf menu will open.

Another useful feature is the “search box”, which essentially gives you the functionality of your application menu search feature inside of your shelf. In Shelf Settings, check “Show the search box”.

The KDE Plasma Shelf widget is a versatile tool that will hopefully bring some order to your chaotic life. At the very least, it will give your desktop the appearance of organization, and that will put you step ahead of most others.

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Getting Screenlet Support

The screenlets package is available in the standard repositories of several major distributions including Ubuntu. If you cannot find it in your system’s package manager (such as Ubuntu Software Center), it can be downloaded manually here.

As noted in the introductory paragraph, further setup of screenlets has been discussed on MakeTechEasier before. If you need more assistance, check out Damien’s article here.

1. Circle Sensors

While not particularly impressive in functionality, Circle Sensors can really make system monitoring gorgeous. The design is very similar to the Ring Sensors screenlet, but using a solid ring instead of one broken into chunks. I believe this gives it a much cleaner and more pleasant look.

2. Disk IO Space

While the standard screenlets application comes with disk space monitoring tools, Disk IO Space comes with a few of its own tricks. For starters, it automatically monitors any devices you have mounted and expands itself to fit the new drive. The most notable feature however (to me at least) is that alongside each drive, in addition to the space graph, you’ll find some colored bars indicating the amount of activity happening on that drive.

3. Sidebar

This screenlet is more about visual style and organization than it is about function. The sidebar is just a (themeable) visual layer that can sit behind your other screenlets to make them distinctly separate from the rest of your desktop.

4. All Core CPU Usage

If you want something more than the current CPU use as a percentage, you can use All Core CPU Usage to see a little bit of recent history. It may not be the prettiest screenlet around but it’s simple and effective.

5. Drag Drop Play

The name should give you a pretty good idea what this screenlet is all about. Dragging a media file from something like Nautilus on to this app will play it. Both audio and video are supported, and it’ll play anything that mplayer can handle (which, by the way, makes mplayer a requirement). Drag Drop Play

6. Impulse

Impulse is pure eye candy, plain and simple. It watches your PulseAudio output and generates a spectrum analyzer along the bottom of your desktop (or wherever you place it). If you use this, it’s recommended to set the window properties to Keep Below, or it’ll get annoying fast.

7. Manometer

While clean and modern design is appreciated by many, some like the vintage look. For them we’ve got the Manometer screenlet which allows you to perform your system monitoring with a more unusual style.

There are dozens more great screenlets in the built-in pack and on Screenlets.org. We couldn’t possibly review them all here, so if you’d like to find more just search or browse through their categories.

If you’ve got any other great screenlets to share, drop a note in the comments below.

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Where do I start?

To show you how to do it, I’m going to use the League Standings table from the Philadelphia Phillies website.  Here’s a link to the site, so you can follow along! Obviously, I’m a huge Phillies fan. As such, I check at least once a day to see how they did in their last game, who their next is against, when it is, and how they’re doing against teams in their division. All this info is in one chart at the Phils’ site. But to open Safari, head over the page, find the link, and load it up is just way too much hassle. So here’s how to add it to the Dashboard.

First, pull up the page. It should look something like this:

Then, click the “File” menu, then click “Open in Dashboard…”. Your screen will dim, and you’ll see a box, like this:

Using the dots on the outline of this box, you can resize it, and perhaps more useful, you can drag it around, and it will automatically resize to parts of the page that you are likely to want to add to your Dashboard. I’m going to scroll down the page and grab the National League East section.

Once you’ve selected what you want to add to the Dashboard, just click the “Add” button in the top right corner. This will automatically bring up your Dashboard, along with your newly added web clip widget!

Don’t like how it looks after all? Or did you grab the wrong thing by accident? Don’t forget, deleting widgets from your Dashboard is as easy as calling up your Dashboard, then holding Option on your keyboard and click the “X” that appears in the upper left hand corner of the widget. In addition, as I said, not only do most operating systems have their own version of widgets, but there are even 3rd party apps that add extra widget functionality to many systems. If you prefer one of these, or even just covet certain features of them, be sure to sound off below!

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Like KDE’s Plasma desktop, Amarok has the ability to display widgets. It is divided into the three columns. The left column is the music browser, which displays the user’s local collection or the Internet music library of his or her choice. The right column shows the current playlist, and the center column can hold a number of widgets. Users must click the wrench icon at the bottom to add, remove, or reorder widgets.

1. Albums

The Albums widget provides users with the most recently added albums when nothing is playing, and when a song is playing, the widget displays the current artists albums. You can navigate through the list of songs for quick access to any other songs by the artist currently in your collection.

2. Current Track

Current Track shows the Album cover, title, artist’s name, Last.fm love button, position marker, play count, score, last played, and track rating.

Right click on the album cover and click “Display Cover” to see the largest available version of the image. Click “Fetch Cover” to download cover art from Amazon. Most of the time this works just fine for big industry artists, but there are some instances where it will display the wrong art or find none at all. In those cases, you can click “Set Custom Cover” to add your own. In addition, click “Tools” and “Cover Manager” at any time to download covers for all of your albums or edit any current ones.

The rating system has a 5-star scale, and each star has a 1/2 setting. You can change your rating of a song at any time, and when no song is playing, the Current Track widget will display top-rated tracks.

3. Lyrics

Rather than having to search the Web for song lyrics, Amarok has a built-in Lyrics widget. Whenever a song starts to play, just click on the Lyrics button to display the widget. Click the configure button in the top right corner to change font style and size. If no lyrics are found, you may have to search the Web, but you will only need to do it once. Simply copy the lyrics you find, click the Edit Lyrics icon, and paste them right into the widget.

4. Photos

One of the features that I just recently discovered is the Photos Widget. While a track is playing, it will run a slideshow of photos from Flickr. In most cases, it will accurately display pictures of the currently playing artist. In some cases, particularly with rappers or singers who have improper nouns as their stage names, you will have to do some configuring.

Click the configure button and add additional keywords that will help Amrok search Flickr for the right photos. You can also set the slideshow animation type and the number of photos to display.

5. Videoclip

The Videoclip widget harnesses the power of YouTube to offer quick links to videos of the song you are currently playing. Because almost every song is on YouTube, you are certain to find something, although it may not always be an official music video.

Once you select a video, it will play within the widget window. To play fullscreen, double click on the video or right click, and then click “fullscreen”. If you click on the link rather than the video thumbnail, it will open the video in your web browser.

6. Wikipedia

Want to know more about your musician? The Wikipedia widget does just what the name implies: displays the Wikipedia entry for the currently playing band or artist. Like the other Internet-based widgets, it assumes that a Wikipedia article actually exists for the person or band you are playing.

Final Thoughts

Amarok is a powerful music player with most of the standard features, such as playlists, album art, and collection/library management. What sets it apart is its extensibility. The widgets that come installed are impressive, and the ability to add more makes Amarok an application worth giving a try. Amarok is free and open source software, released under the GPL and is part of the KDE software compilation.

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In a previous MTE article, you learned how to create a unified desktop using the KDE 4 Oxygen themes for KDE, GTK, and Firefox. Oxygen is clean, simple, and visually pleasing, but some people want a little more flexibility. QtCurve is a theming system that gives you the configuring power to have varieties of themes, from downright plain to shiny eye candy.

Best of all, QtCurve has native support for KDE 4, KDE 3, GTK, Qt4, and Qt3. For those who are frighteningly obsessive about having uniform boxes, buttons, and sliders, QtCurve is perfect.

If QtCurve is in your Linux (or other Unix-like OS) distribution’s repository, installing qtcurve is as simple as a single command, such as the Ubuntu command:

sudo apt-get install qtcurve

Many distributions, however, do not have the latest version. For that you will need to compile it from source. First, visit KDE-Look.org, and download all three source archives: KDE 4, KDE 3, and Gtk 2. Then, open a terminal, such as Konsole, and follow these steps:

(Note: To compile from source, you will need the qt, gtk, and kde development libraries installed)

1. Extract the archives:

tar -xvjf QtCurve-Gtk2-1.2.0.tar.bz2
tar -xvjf QtCurve-KDE3-1.2.0.tar.bz2
tar -xvjf QtCurve-KDE4-1.2.0.tar.bz2

2. Repeat these steps for each directory:

cd QtCurve-KDE4-1.2.0
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make
make install
exit

3. Start KDE “System Settings”

4. Click “Appearance”

5. In the “Style” tab, click the widget style dropdown menu and select “QtCurve”

6. Click “Configure…”

7. Choose a preset theme, import one you have downloaded from KDE-look.org, or fiddle with the settings until you have the theme you want

8. Click the “Legacy” option (third from the bottom)

9. Click “Export colors and fonts” for both KDE3 and pure Qt3, and then click OK

10. With the appearance settings still open, click “GTK Styles and Fonts”

11. Choose “User another style”, select “QtCurve”, and then click “Apply”

12. Close System Settings

At this point, you have configured the KDE4 and GTK2 settings, but your pure Qt3 and Qt4 apps, such as SMplayer and Arora browser, will be unaffected. Follow these steps to configure each.

1. Press Alt-F2 and type “qtconfig” in the Run Command dialog

2. When the Qt-Configuration window appears, select “QtCurve” as the GUI style

3. Click “File” and “Save”

4. Close the window

5. Press Alt-F2 again and this time type “qtconfig-qt4″

6. Select QtCurve, click “File” and “Save”, and close the window.

You should now have a completely unified desktop with all of your apps looking like they were cut from the same mold. You can control colors for all widget sets in your normal KDE color dialog in System Settings. You also have the option of using the QtCurve window decorator, which now supports KDE 4′s window grouping (a.k.a. tabbed windows). Configuration options for the window decoration are in the QtCurve style settings dialog.

To download more QtCurve themes, visit KDE-Look.org and click “Themes/Styles”. Look for themes that have “QtCurve” next to the titles or just use the search function.

Enjoy!

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There are already several visual components of the K desktop environment that are already integrated. Among them are: desktop wallpaper, Plasma themes, KDM themes, KSplash, color schemes, icon themes, emoticons, and widgets (plasmoid scripts). What this means is that a user can open the dialog to change one of these elements, download new themes, and apply them without ever having to leave the window.

Installing themes

For example, to install a new wallpaper for your desktop, follow these simple steps:

1. Right click on the desktop.
2. Click “Desktop Settings”. (The shortcut for these steps is Alt+S+D).
3. At the bottom of the settings window, click “Get New Wallpapers”

By the default, the source will be KDE-Look.org. In the future, there may be other sources.

4. Find the wallpaper you want and click the “Install” button to the right of it. You may install as many as you want while the window is open.
5. Click “close”
6. Select the new wallpaper from the “Picture” dropdown menu.
7. Click “OK”

Changing a plasma theme is a very similar process.

1. Right click on the desktop.
2. Click “Desktop Settings”
3. Under “Desktop Theme” select “New Theme…”
4. Install the theme you want, and select it from the dropdown menu

If you ever decide that you do not like a particular element within the Plasma theme, you can replace that element with one from another. To do this:

1. In “System Settings” click the “Advanced” tab.
2. Click “Desktop Theme Details”

Here you can change single elements of the Plasma theme and then save it under a new name. You can also download themes directly from here.

3. To change the Kickoff (menu) theme, for example, click the dropdown menu and select a different theme.
4. Click “Apply”.

With this feature, you can also import your own files to create your own new theme. To save your own custom theme, check the “More” box at the bottom and add the name, author, version, and description.

To change KDM (display/login manager) themes, KSplash (the open splash screen in KDE), color schemes, icon themes, or emoticons:

1. Select “System Settings” from the K-menu.
2. Under “Look and Feel” click “Appearance”
3. Select the appearance feature you want to change.

As of KDE 4.3.4, you must still download styles, window decorations, and fonts manually, but since all of these are present on KDE-Look.org, it stands to reason that integration may follow in future releases.

Installing widgets

There are currently two types of plasmoid widgets: binaries and scripts. For the binaries, you must either compile them from source or download pre-built packages from a website or distribution repository. For plasmoid scripts, you can install them directly from KDE-Look.org. To install one:

1. Right click on the desktop or click the Plasma Toolbox (Cashew)
2. If your widgets are locked, click “Unlock Widgets”
3. Click “Add Widgets”
4. At the bottom of the new window, click “Install New Widgets”
5. In the menu, click “Download New Plasma Widgets”

KDE-Look.org will only show you the scripts and not the binaries.

6. Find the widget you want to install and click the “Install” button.

As you can see, all of this is very easy, well-integrated, and seamless. On occasion, you might find a particular theme that will not download. This is usually due to the creator using a download service that requires user input (like a captcha) or has a download timer for non-paying users. Those of you who wish to offer your script for download should find a free alternative.

Applications such as Kopete also have KDE-Look.org integration, and you can expect to see this in many other applications in the future, particularly Amarok, which already has themes and widgets. The system that KDE has established will make it easy for new software developers to create applications with this themability built-in, allowing its users to create and distribute customizations all from KDE-Look.org.

Furthermore, other OpenDesktop.org features can be integrated into KDE, GNOME, XFCE, and others. This includes many of the social media features that the website has adopted. The future for Unix-based desktop environments appears to be one of well-integrated and virtually connected desktops, making mobility easier and the visual experience more pleasing to the eyes.

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As such, several developers have taken advantage of this to introduce alternative user interfaces for Windows Mobile devices. Given that the platform (while under supported in recent years) is the most versatile of all the flavours of mobile available, this shouldn’t be too much of a surprise.

Key among these developers is Spb Software, who over the last few years have released a succession of mobile shells for Windows Mobile. The latest of these is Spb Mobile Shell 3 which is available as a free 14 day trial from Spb Software, full price $29.95.

Configuring Spb Mobile Shell 3

Spb Mobile Shell 3 is the most popular of the Windows Mobile user interface enhancements, mostly due to it being so user friendly, easily configurable and requiring minimal resources. Once installed, there are several things that you may wish to do – such as manage your contacts or organise your mobile desktop.

Finger friendly and capable of being used almost exclusively without having to resort to any Windows Mobile index menus or settings (other than Pocket Outlook screens), Spb Mobile Shell 3 offers a smooth and well presented layout of all of your vital mobile information. A three-screen-wide desktop allows for the effective arrangement of favourite applications, tools and contacts, while a variety of different functions (address book, calendar, settings and others) can be accessed via a carousel system.

The Desktop

The first thing to do once you have installed Spb Mobile Shell 3 is to setup your desktop. There are two choices of desktop:

• The standard “Professional” look that displays time, calendar, upcoming appointments, weather and any email/SMS/missed call alerts,
• The “Lifestyle” layout which can be configured entirely to your requirements.

Spb Mobile Shell’s Lifestyle desktop offers the three-screen-wide option, allowing email notifications, widgets for launching favourite applications and much more to be displayed at the required position and size.

For instance to add a widget of your favourite Windows Mobile game to your Spb Mobile Shell 3 desktop view, press the Menu button on the lower right of the display, go to Add Widget and browse Applications -> Games. Once placed on the desktop you can also resize and reposition the widget before confirming the addition.

Desktop Background

A range of standard widgets are available to begin with, such as analogue and digital clock types, calendar, messaging notifications and it’s also possible to change your desktop background.

To do this, press the Menu button on the lower right of the display and select Change Background. From here you can browse through images in the Spb Mobile Shell folder on your Windows Mobile device and select an image that suits. If you have images elsewhere on your phone to use, they will need to be copied to the Spb Mobile Shell folder which can be found in the Program Files folder on your phone.

Alternative Spb Mobile Shell 3 backgrounds can be downloaded from the website – 40 alternatives from the included 6 are available offering a range of scenery.

Add a Contact and Manage Widgets

Adding a shortcut to one of your contacts is simple too – press the Menu button on the lower right of the display and select Add Widget -> Shortcuts -> Contact.

The required contact will then appear on your Spb Mobile Shell 3 desktop – but if they haven’t got a photo assigned you’ll just see an outline and the contact name.

As with all desktop widgets in Spb Mobile Shell 3, you can move the contact to a different screen of your finger friendly scrolling desktop display, and resize it.

To do this, open the Menu again and select Edit Layout. From here, select the widget you want to change – you’ll see that it is now highlighted with a heavy white outline and a down-pointing white triangle. Touch the widget you want to adjust – a new menu will offer options to move it to a left or right page of the desktop, to display a text label for the widget or to resize it.

Spb Mobile Shell 3 is a superbly configurable interface for Windows Mobile devices that completely re-states what it means to use a Windows Phone device.

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When Google Gadgets were released for Linux, many people once again praised Google’s support of free and open source software, but there was just one problem. The two major desktop environments for Linux, GNOME and KDE, both already had desktop widget components that were better integrated into their overall desktops. Fortunately, the Google developers were well aware of this and built in the interoperability that would allow the GNOME and KDE developers to seamlessly integrate the two.

With the release of KDE 4.2, Google Gadgets became fully integrated into Plasma. You can add them to your desktop with a few clicks of your mouse, unless you happen to be a Kubuntu user. For reasons that are outside the scope of this article, Kubuntu developers decided to remove the Google Gadget code from Plasma.  Being the stubborn hackers that we are, however, we are going to get them back.  This will require a little compiling of software, but I will walk you through each step.

All of these steps assume that you have the latest Kubuntu version 9.04 “Jaunty Jackalope”. It might work with earlier versions, although I make no guarantees.

The good news is that the Google Gadgets libraries are still in the kdebase source. You just have to rebuild the kdebase-workspace package.

1. The first thing that I recommend doing is creating a working directory:

Start Konsole and type:

mkdir kde4-build
cd kde4-build

2. Install the Google Gadgets library packages:

sudo apt-get install libggadget-qt-1.0-dev
sudo apt-get install libggadget-1.0-dev

3. Install the kdebase-workspace source package and its dependencies:

sudo apt-get source kdebase-workspace
sudo apt-get build-dep kdebase-workspace

4. Next, you will need to configure the kdebase-workspace source to prepare it for building:

cd kdebase-workspace-4.2.1a
cmake .

5. You only need to compile the Google Gadgets script engine portion:

cd plasma/scriptengines/google_gadgets
make

6. Finally, just copy the Google Gadget binaries to their proper locations:

sudo cp ../../../lib/plasma_package_ggl.so /usr/lib/kde4/
sudo cp ../../../lib/plasma_scriptengine_ggl.so /usr/lib/kde4/
sudo cp plasma-packagestructure-googlegadgets.desktop /usr/share/kde4/services/
sudo cp plasma-scriptengine-googlegadgets.desktop /usr/share/kde4/services/
sudo cp plasma-applet-ggl-photos.desktop /usr/share/kde4/services/
sudo cp plasma-applet-ggl-rss.desktop /usr/share/kde4/services/

7. Restart KDE

When you log back into KDE, you should now have support for Google Gadgets.

8. Open the add widgets dialog as you normally would, click on “Install New Widgets”, and then click “Download New Google Gadgets”.

When you add Google Gadgets from the Gadget Browser, they will appear in the normal Plasma dialog, which you can then use to add to your desktop. If, for some reason, you do not see all 61 gadgets, you might need to start Google Gadgets independently once, close it, restart plasma, and then try again.

That is all it takes to get Google Gadgets up and running in Plasma on Kubuntu Jaunty.

* Portions of this article were adapted from the guide writen by Francesco Santini, released under a CreativeCommons-Attribution-3.0 license.

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