Konfiguring KDE2 - page 2

Finding Help in the Right Places

A hacker who knows what he's about would at this point have dived into the Makefiles to see why my little variation on a schema wasn't getting installed. I'm not such a hacker, but I was prepared to try this and really break some stuff, but first ....

One of the hardest habits to break when moving to Linux or another open source OS is the thought process that says that configurations are stored in mystically compiled and cleverly hidden binary files, that if it ain't on a menu, you can't order it. But in Linux, virtually every configuration is in plain text someplace. Yes, all those fancy GUI tools are simply specialized, glorified text editors. They do prevent a lot of mistakes, and they do format everything nicely, but their output is nevertheless plain old ASCII. KDE is no different. It stores individual user settings in ~/.kde (the hidden kde directory in the user's home directory), and the possibilities in the /share/apps/ directory of the main KDE directory (usually /opt/kde). So I took a look.

In /opt/kde/share/apps/konsole, I found the various schema (schemae?) that are installed when Konsole is. They were utterly unchanged from their incarnation in the source directory. I copied my nifty new file to this directory, fired up Konsole, and there, on the menu, it now appeared. I was so pleased with myself that I made two more, one with bright green text and one with bright yellow text. Putting them in the proper directory gave them a place on the options menu, too.

Now. If the purpose of this little story were to demonstrate that I'm a kewl haxor d00d, anyone with the brains to have switched from Windows could see that I've fallen waaaay short. Fortunately, that's not the point.