As I have now installed Slackware 12.1, I have tried to wean myself from Gnome (wonderful) to use the Slackware-standard KDE (semi-competent) I have run into a tangle that I can't unravel. Whenever a link within an OpenOffice (2.4.1, currently) document is clicked, Konqueror comes up. My "default browser", Firefox, Flock, Netscape doesn't. I would like almost any other browser rather than Konqueror to come up. I would be happy with lynx instead of Konqueror. Konqueror is the most useless piece of KDE. The text-rendering engine in Konqueror doesn't permit cut and paste into OpenOffice spreadsheets without some bothersome hacking. I can, of course, cut-paste out of any other common browser.

Further on the issue of KDE, does anyone know of a nicer terminal emulator than those offered as standards? One that emulated the gnome-terminal would be wonderful. As far as I can tell, all the terminals offered under KDE insert a CR/LF at the end of lines on the terminal.

Perhaps I should just bite the bullet, trash the KDE window manager, and load in Dropline or FreeRock Gnome. I really would prefer Gnome. For now, I just drop off to Xfce when using OpenOffice spreadsheets or documents.

Olivia ( olivia.jensen@mcgill.ca )

Open the Control Center, in menu KDE Components -> Component Chooser -> Web Browser, and choose your browser of choice. Also try opening the firefox preferences and under the main tab > system defaults > click on "check now". Set to "yes"

As for a better terminal emulator you could try Eterm.

Good luck!

If the suggested answer to your first question hasn't helped (you've not yet given any indication on whether it did or not...) then the following may help. I noticed a while back that the 'Preview in Web Browser' option on the File menu was launching Konqueror rather than Firefox which was set as the default browser in kcontrol. A look through some strace output revealed that OpenOffice was invoking kfmclient in order to view the html file. In kcontrol > KDE Components > File Associations the first application listed for text/html was Konqueror. Changing the order so Firefox was first caused Firefox to be launched instead of Konqueror.

Thank you Arizonagroovejet... I did manage to find that for myself yesterday.

I'm still looking for a terminal that acts like gnome-terminal. I've tried Termit and Yakuake but both of these also insert a /newline at the end of each terminal line to continue to the next line. I want a line-wrapping terminal, I guess. Several KDE applications seem to default to the pre-X11 insertion of an end-of-line to continue onto the next. Gnome-terminal didn't do this and I found it was remarkably convenient for cutting and pasting between terminals and documents.

I still haven't installed the Gnome Desktop for Slackware-12.1 as I was hoping to run an almost default installation using Xfce and KDE. As it turns out, I have to hack the installation quite a lot already just to install the software that I was running under Slackware-10.1. I guess I could hack up just enough of Gnome to run the gnome-terminal in the same manner. The tangle of dependencies is getting pretty deep as linux distributions evolve and evolve away from each other. It took me almost an hour just to find working/compatible libraries necessary to an installation of Audacity and while I have it working reliably, now, I really don't have a completely coherent set of libraries loaded.

And again, thank you Arizona....

Before you start too far down the road, one of the first stops you should make is to slackbuilds.org. They have build scripts for a ton of software (Audacity included) along with all of the dependencies. If you're trying to wean yourself from Gnome, maybe you should investigate some of the alternatives to Gnome programs.

As far as terminals go, I like aterm and/or mrxtv (which uses tabs for multiple terminals). The build scripts are on Slackbuilds.org if you want to give either one a try.

Thank you for advice Hangdog42...

I'm still looking for a terminal I like and find as useful in cutting and pasting across documents as gnome-terminal. I've tried termit, rxvt, yakuake, Eterm, Terminal, uxterm, xterm and the KDE konsole terminal. All of these insert a "newline" at the end of lines rather than wrapping to the next line and so I have to reconstruct long cut-and-pastes. emacs doesn't do this and so I don't think this issue is some artifact of KDE. Also, I have backed up to my old Slackware 10.1 installation with KDE 3.3 installed and, there, run gnome-terminal to find that it wraps as I like. It may be that somehow I can force xterm to wrap properly but I don't know which, if any, of the app-defaults might force this. What I would really like is a gnome-terminal but I was hoping not to have to fully install Dropline or FreeRock Gnome just to get a useful terminal. It seems that gnome-terminal is pretty deeply embedded into Gnome.

I'll look into aterm and thank you.

I've now tried aterm and it behaves just as do all the other terminals I mentioned previously. I'll look into source code for gnome-terminal and see if I can compile a minimal version that will run under KDE with the behaviour I like.