KDE: Creating a RocketDock style quick launch bar

Since a few days I've been looking for a KDE replacement of RocketDock, which is basically a quicklaunch bar at the top of the screen.
Today I came up with a nice solution, which isnt a perfect replacement, but enough for what I wanted:

KDE 4.6 is out and I love it!

Today I discovered KDE has released version 4.6 of their desktop Suite.
It is really awesome and much faster, although I still have to explore the details a bit further (never used e.g. "Activities"). I was surprised by the really cool login screen, then by the faceted search feature of dolphin, etc....

Desktop and Dolphin

I came to that point when I booted kubuntu on my desktop pc to upgrade it to Kubuntu 10.10 Maverick. When I clicked on the wifi icon, something totally different than on my laptop showed up. Have to admit I have been using Windows 7 on it for a while, but I was astonished how fast Kubuntu (still with old KDE) was. I thought that I might have missed something during the various dist-upgrades on my laptop and stumbled upon the great news. I first updated on my laptop(just add ppa:kubuntu-ppa/backports to your software sources via KPackageKit), which didn't make any effect on that network-manager tray icon, the old one was still there.

T42p: Making AccessIbm Button launch an application

Under Kubuntu, the "Access IBM" button has no function. I just decided to change that, luckily it's like a key on the normal keyboard so we can assign an action to it.
In my example this will be konsole, the KDE terminal. You can't ever get enough of them ^^
Follow these simple steps:

• Open KDE system settings dialog
• Click 'keyboard shortcuts and gesture control'
• Now "My Shortcuts" on the left should be highlighted. At the bottom center of the dialog, click "Edit", then "New->Global Shortcut->Command/Address"
• Give the Action a name, e.g. "AccessIbm Button"
• Go to the "trigger" tab, click on the button and press the "Access IBM" key. If the caption changed, you can succeed, else retry
• Go to the action tab and type /usr/bin/konsole into the text field
• Click "Apply"

Now you're done! Press the "Access IBM" key to test it and have fun ;)
From what I've seen you also can assign dbus signals, keystrokes(keyboard macro functions!) , etc. just play around with it a bit.

Upgrading to KDE SC 4.5

Recently KDE SC 4.5 came out and as I always try live on the cutting edge of software, I tried to update it which first ran me into the fact KPackageKit wouldn't update half of the whole KDE.
I found out by some googling(shame this became a verb! Forestling should become one...) that the reason is that the kubuntu-ppa might contain older packages than kubuntu backports, so the solution was to just disable all source which were no kubuntu archives.
For upgrading just add
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-ppa/backports/ubuntu lucid main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-ppa/backports/ubuntu lucid main
into /etc/apt/sources.list.d/kubuntu-backports-ppa using your favourite editor or KPackageKit and run sudo update apt-get update (KPackageKit does that for you automatically).

If you are lucky you just have to run
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
If this does not work for you, just try alternating those two, eventually with the -f parameter until everything is installed and then reboot.

I discovered today that the ibus package wasn't installed, too so I installed it and run ibus-setup. We will see what that brings :)
KDE SC 4.5 runs a bit smoother, but sometimes it consumes peaks of 20% of the 1.8 GHz CPU of my T42p (which is still a good laptop :) ).
Have fun!

Goodbye Windows, welcome Kubuntu

Yesterday I discovered that my Windows 7 RC1 reboots all 2 hours(which I already had expected) and there was a Kubuntu 9.10 CD lying on my desktop. As I successfully use it on my company's laptop with no issues, I decided its the right time to install it for my private everyday use, too.
Said and done. But after installing the nvidia drivers plus a dist-upgrade, KDE won't show anymore and I discovered it was not 64-Bit. Jens recommended me to try Kubuntu Lucid Lynx (10.04 beta 2) and now I am a really happy and satisfied Kubuntu user.
The installation process itself was quite laggy, but finally it worked fine, including current Firefox and Thunderbird (yeah, finally 3.0). Before I did anything other, I searched for proprietary graphics drivers (for my NDVIA card) via the "Hardware Drivers" utitly of KDE. Surpise, surprise, everything already set up and running fine! WLAN - no problem. Sound over S/PDIF - no problem(just push up the digital device in Multimedia settings for all media types).
When it came to S/PDIF for VideoLAN player, it costed me some time, but finally I just tried setting the sampling frequency to 48000 and it worked fine again :)
Then a pidgin here, a KsCD there, all fine.
I even installed a really cool game called Kobo Deluxe (a 2D space shooter) which ran without any issues!

It came me into mind that the (K)ubuntu logo, the nice-looking ring, could be a wedding ring: Once you get first familiar and then married with Ubuntu Linux, you won't be able to betray it - it's just to awesome to really going back to windows :D
Besides Windows 7 costs about 85 Euro for Home Premium with nearly no usable software(okay except Media Center maybe) and with Ubuntu (and other Linux distributions) you can get everything for free, can take a look at the source, report bugs which are quickly solved in most cases and there's so many free software available in places where the appropiate windows replacement would cost hundreds of dollars. Just think about The GIMP vs. Adobe Photoshop...

Just COOOL! 8-)