FOSSwire

The KDE desktop environment has a shared bookmarks store that can be used across different KDE applications. Most commonly, though, you will use it to store your favourite websites in Konqueror.

Coming back to your bookmarks later is usually done by accessing the Bookmarks menu within Konqueror, navigating the menus and clicking a bookmark.

KIO_Bookmarks, however, offers an alternative interface to your KDE bookmarks that you can access as a web page in Konqueror. After installation, you simply browse to bookmarks:/ in any capable KDE app.

It is a very useful way of looking at your bookmarks, especially if you have many of them in a complex folder hierarchy, as it makes the most of a full web page view to display your bookmark information.

Konqueror web browser users who rely on their bookmarks to visit their frequented websites might like to set their home page to this view to quickly launch their favourite sites.

Note that this program is for KDE 4 only.

In KDE 3, extracting archives, such as zip and tar files, is pretty simple. You just find the relevant file in Konqueror or Dolphin, right-click it and choose Extract for a list of extraction options.

For some reason, that functionality hasn't been copied over to KDE 4. Now, you must open up Ark for each archive and use the extraction wizard from there.

Extract and Compress KDE4 is a service menu for KDE 4 that restores the right-click extract functionality and once again makes it simple and quick to extract archive files. It also restores the functionality to make archives from the right-click menu.

Go ahead and download the tar.gz file from the website and extract it (yes, using the slow method this last time).

Double-click install.sh in this folder to start the installation of the service menu.

You will first be asked whether to perform this installation for just your user, or for the whole system. Choose whatever you prefer - obviously you can only do the whole system if you have the administrator rights and the right password.

You'll be asked for the password if necessary and then a folder selection box will come up. Here, you have to select the directory to install in, which must be where your KDE 4 service menus are stored.

On my Kubuntu 8.04 system, the right place for all users is /usr/lib/kde4/share/kde4/services/, so I choose that folder in the selector.

To find out where your service menu directories are, you can run this command in a terminal:

$ kde4-config --path services

That will spit out a list of the directories you can install in, separated by colons (:). In most cases there will be two entries, one in your home folder and one elsewhere. Choose the one in your home folder if you're doing a single user install, or the other one for all users.

Once you know the right directory to install in, choose it in the folder selector dialogue and click OK to install.

The program will now disappear for a few seconds while it installs, so have a little patience until you are notified the install is done.

That's it, the new service menu for extracting and compressing files is installed. You will need to close and re-open any applications, such as Dolphin and Konqueror, before the new options will show up in the right-click menu.

Download managers, although frowned upon by some, are often useful applications for those of us who download a lot of files, or are on slower connections and want to use a dedicated application (perhaps with some tricks up its sleeve) for the downloading of files.

KGet is KDE's resident dedicated download program and is capable of acting both as a download manager for the Konqueror browser, as well as a standalone program.

On your system, KGet might already be installed. If not, you should be able to find a package named kget or get it as part of the kdenetwork metapackage.

When you first launch KGet, it asks you whether you want to enable that Konqueror integration I just mentioned.

Then, it all but disappears into a blue arrow in the system tray, usually at the bottom right of the screen.

There are now a few different ways you can start a download.

Konqueror Integration

If you chose to use KGet as Konqueror's download manager, next time you click a link that forces a download, KGet will spring into action.

If you didn't enable the integration feature, you can still use KGet on a case-by-case basis, by right-clicking a download link and choosing Actions > Download with KGet from within Konqueror.

Once a download has started, you can click on the arrow in the system tray (now coloured green) to see the progress of ongoing downloads.

Starting Downloads Manually

If you don't browse with Konqueror, you may wish to kick off a download manually.

Open up KGet by clicking its icon, then click the Open button in the main window, or choose File > Open. Then simply paste the download URL in that window.

Controlling Downloads

As you'd expect from any advanced download manager, KGet includes many features that the download system in your browser doesn't.

Downloads can be paused, resumed, queued and delayed as you please, by using the controls in the menu. Of course, don't restrict yourself to downloading one thing at a time!

KGet becomes most efficient when you are able to download multiple items at once as the available bandwidth can be maximised for optimum efficiency.

For those on slower connections that are not 'always-on', KGet's offline mode allows you to queue up downloads for later, and the auto-disconnect functionality means that KGet will automatically close the internet connection once its work is done.

Drop Target

One final feature I want to show is the drop target. In KGet, go to Settings > Show Drop Target.

A large draggable arrow icon appears on the screen.

As the name suggests, anything you drag and drop onto this icon will be downloaded by KGet. This should work in all KDE applications and many other non-KDE applications as well (including Firefox).