When you start your system, you are usually prompted to enter your username and password. If you did not install your system yourself, check with your system administrator for your username and password.

After logging in to KDE for the first time, you see the KDE desktop, which shows the following basic elements:

Desktop Icons: Click an icon on the desktop to access its associated program or application. Right-click to open a context menu for moving, copying, or performing other functions on an icon.

Desktop Context Menu: Right-click an empty area on the desktop to access this context menu for creating new objects, such as files, folders, or bookmarks; configuring the appearance of the desktop; running applications; and logging out.

KDE Panel: By default, the panel of your KDE desktop consists of the following areas (from left to right): main menu button, quick launcher, desktop previewer, taskbar, and system tray. You can add or remove icons in the panel and customize the appearance of the panel as well as its location on the desktop. Click the arrow at the far right to hide the panel. If you hold your mouse pointer over an icon in the panel, a short description is displayed.

Main Menu Button: Click the icon at the far left of the panel to access a menu leading to all programs, tools, and applications on your system. The function-oriented menu structure makes it easy to find the right application for your purpose even if you do not know the application names yet.

Quick Launcher: The quick launcher contains some larger icons that are shortcuts to frequently used programs, folders, and functions, such as an Internet browser, your home folder, and the online Help Center.

Desktop Previewer: Between the quick launcher and the taskbar, find a miniature preview that shows your virtual desktops. SUSE Linux Enterprise allows you to organize your programs and tasks on several desktops, which minimizes the number of windows to arrange on the screen (Section 4, “Using Virtual Desktops”). To switch between desktops, click one of the symbols in the previewer.

Taskbar: By default, all started applications and open windows are displayed in the taskbar, which allows you to access any application regardless of the currently active desktop. Click to open the application. Right-click to see options for moving, restoring, or minimizing the window.

System Tray: This rightmost part of the panel usually holds some smaller icons, including the system clock displaying time and date, the volume control, and icons for several other helper applications.

To run a program in SUSE Linux Enterprise, click the main menu icon in the panel or press Alt+F1 to open it and navigate the submenus. Click an entry to start the corresponding program.

If you already know the name of an application but are not sure how to start it from the main menu, use the main menu search function. Just type a part of the application's name into the search field without pressing Enter afterward. If the application is installed on your system, the menu structure leading to this application is highlighted in the main menu.

You can change the way your KDE desktop looks and behaves to suit your own personal tastes and needs.

3.2. Using the KDE Control Center¶

Apart from changing individual desktop elements, KDE allows you to personalize your desktop to a very high degree. Find more settings to adjust the overall appearance and behavior of your desktop in the KDE Control Center. There, you can also change fonts, keyboard and mouse configuration, regional and language settings, parameters for your Internet and network usage, and more.

Start the Control Center from the main menu by selecting Personal Settings or press Alt+F2 and enter kcontrol.

The sidebar provides different categories with a subset of settings each. To get an impression of the numerous possibilities, just click a category icon and explore the possibilities provided there.

For an overview of all categories, switch to a tree view. Change the view by selecting View +Mode+Tree View.

Clicking an item displays the corresponding settings on the right. Change the settings as desired. No changes take effect until you click Apply. Reset all items on the page to the default values by clicking Default. Performing tasks in some areas of the Control Center requires system administrator (otherwise known as root) permissions.

The desktop environment allows you to organize your programs and tasks on several virtual desktops. If you often run a lot of programs simultaneously, this minimizes the number of windows to arrange on your screen. You might, for example, use one desktop for e-mailing and calendaring and another for word processing or graphics applications.

If your computer supports Xgl, you can use graphical effects like turning your desktop into a rotating 3D cube, enabling translucent or transparent windows, zooming in and out of the desktop screen, and using other window effects, such as shadows, fading, and transformations.

To enable and use Xgl, some hardware requirements must be met—in particular, your graphics adapter must be capable of providing 3D support. After your system has been configured for Xgl as described in KDE User Guide, you can make use of the following effects:

Konqueror is a unified Web browser, file manager, document viewer, and image viewer. As a file manager, it lets you display, manage, and create files and generally organize your file system the way you like.

Start Konqueror as a file manager by clicking the house icon in the panel. Konqueror displays the contents of your home directory.

6.1. Konqueror Main Window¶

The Konqueror main window consists of the following elements:

Menu Bar: The menu bar holds menu items for actions like copying, moving, or deleting files, changing views, starting additional tools, defining your settings, and getting help.

Toolbar: The toolbar provides quick access to frequently used functions that can also be accessed via the menu. If you hover the pointer over an icon, a short description is displayed.

Location Bar: The location bar shows the path to your directory or file in your file system. You can enter a path to a directory directly by typing it in or by clicking one of the directories in the display field. Delete the contents of the location bar by clicking the black symbol with a white X on the left. After typing an address, press Enter.

Navigation Panel:  Hide and show the navigation panel on the left by pressing F9. The navigation panel displays your information in a tree view. Determine which contents to see by clicking one of the symbols in the tab at the left of the navigation panel. If you hold your mouse pointer over an icon, a short description is displayed.

Display Field: The display field shows the contents of the selected directory or file. In the View menu, choose between different view modes to display the contents, such as Icon View, Tree View, or Detailed List View. If you click a file, Konqueror shows a preview of the contents or loads the file into an application for further processing. If you hold the mouse pointer over the file, Konqueror shows a tool tip with detailed information about the file, such as owner, permissions, or last modification date.

6.3. Browsing the Internet with Konqueror¶

To use Konqueror as a Web browser, just type a URL in the location bar. Like Firefox*, Konqueror also features tabbed browsing. This means that you can load one page in the background while reading another. To open an empty tab in Konqueror, press Ctrl+Shift+N and enter a new URL. Alternatively, right-click a link in the Web site currently displayed and select Open in New Tab. Right-click a tab to access more tab options, like reloading, duplicating, or closing the tab.

You can also use bookmarks for your favorite Web sites (and also for files and folders). Add and manage your bookmarks with the Bookmarks menu.

As well as Konqueror, SUSE Linux Enterprise also includes the Firefox Web browser. To start Firefox, press Alt+F2 and enter firefox.

With features like tabbed browsing, pop-up window blocking, and download and image management, Firefox combines the latest Web technologies. Its easy access to different search engines helps you find the information needed. Enter a URL in the location bar to start browsing. To open an empty tab in Firefox, press Ctrl+T and enter a new URL. To open a link in a new tab, click the link with your middle mouse button. Right-click the tab itself to access more tab options. You can create a new tab, reload one or all existing tabs, or close them. You can also change the sequence of the tabs by dragging and dropping them to the desired position.

7.2. Downloading Files from the Web¶

If you download a file with Firefox, the Download Manager starts and saves this file to the folder configured in the preferences. By default, your desktop is the destination folder for downloaded files. Firefox shows your finished downloads in a dialog box.

You can open the downloaded files from there directly. To clean up the history of downloaded files, click Clean Up.

7.3. Configuring Firefox Preferences¶

To adjust the default download folder or activate or modify the pop-up blocking feature, click Edit+Preferences.

From here, you can also configure numerous other settings, such as appearance, language, privacy, and tab options. Just click the icons and set the options on each page according to your preferences. Click Close to apply the changes.

When you select the option to remember a password in a KDE application for the first time (for your e-mail account, for example), the KWallet wizard starts by default. KWallet is a password management tool that can collect all passwords and store them in an encrypted file.

To activate KWallet, select Basic Setup and click Next. Select Yes, I wish to use the KDE wallet to store my personal information and enter a password. This is your master password to open KWallet. It cannot be recovered if you forget it. Click Finish to close the wizard. After this initial configuration, you can open your wallet at any time to view, search, delete, or create entries. Normally you do not need to insert an entry manually. KDE recognizes if a resource requires authentication and KWallet starts automatically, prompting you for the KWallet password.

For reading and managing your mails and appointments in SUSE Linux Enterprise, you can use Kontact as your personal information management tool (PIM). Kontact combines KDE applications like KMail, KOrganizer, and KAddressBook into a single interface. This gives you easy access to your e-mail, calendar, address book, and other PIM functionality.

9.1. Starting Kontact for the First Time¶

To start Kontact, press Alt+F2 and enter kontact. To access one of the components, click the corresponding icon in the left sidebar.

Before sending or receiving mails, you must configure your e-mail account.

1. Click the Mail icon then select Settings+Configure KMail.

2. In the configuration dialog, click Accounts. There you can configure the settings for outgoing and incoming mails.

3. For incoming mails, click the Receiving tab and click Add. Select the appropriate account type and enter the details in the following dialog.

4. Proceed similarly for outgoing mails on the Sending tab. If you are not sure about the settings or items to select, consult your Internet Service Provider or system administrator.

Kopete is an online messenger application that allows multiple partners connected to the Internet to chat with each other. Kopete currently supports all common messenger protocols, such as AOL* Instant Messenger (AIM), GroupWise® Messenger, ICQ, IRC, Jabber*, Lotus* Sametime, MSN, SMS, and Yahoo!*. To be able to use instant messaging (IM), you must register with a provider offering IM services.

To start Kopete, press Alt+F2 and enter kopete. When you start Kopete for the first time, a configuration wizard appears that assists you in creating your user profile.

First, select the service with which you have registered and click Continue. Then enter the user data received on registration with the messaging service: a user ID, a password, and the server name and port. Complete the configuration of the messenger account by clicking Finish.

Add contacts to chat with them by clicking File+Add Contact. An assistant appears to help with creation. However, you must be online and connected to the selected messaging service to add a contact to your list.

To start a chat, click the desired contact and type your message in the lower part of the chatting window. Press Enter to send the message. The upper part of the window displays the messages sent and received.

The office suite LibreOffice offers a complete set of office tools, including word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, vector drawing, and database components. Because LibreOffice is available for a number of operating systems, you can use the same data across different computing platforms.

To start LibreOffice, press Alt+F2 and enter OOo or open the main menu and navigate to Office Suite. To create a new document, select File+New and choose the type of document to create. To open an existing document, select Open and choose the appropriate file from the file system.

Documents that need to be shared or printed across platforms can be saved as PDF (Portable Document Format) files, for example, in the LibreOffice suite. SUSE Linux Enterprise ships with several PDF viewers, such as KPDF and Adobe* Acrobat* Reader.

KDE provides more than one application for finding data on your computer or in the file system. With Kerry, you can easily search your personal information space (usually your home folder), which is indexed by Beagle®. KFind is another option.

If you have a CD or DVD writer, you can burn files to a CD or DVD with K3b.

With digiKam, it is easy to manage your digital images: download your images from the camera, edit and improve them, organize them in albums (or flag them with tags for easy retrieval, independent of folders or albums), and archive them on CD or export them to a Web image gallery. digiKam also contains a set of useful batch functions and plug-ins, allowing you to convert multiple images to various different formats, rename multiple images, or automatically improve them with functions such as red eye reduction, speck removal, and hot pixel removal. Various filter and effect plug-ins help create works of art from your digital images.

To start digiKam, press Alt+F2 and enter digikam. On first start-up, digiKam creates a custom folder in which to store your albums.

digiKam's main window contains a tree view at the left and shows thumbnails of the images at the right. For quick access to your images, use the sidebar at the left, which allows you to switch between different views, sorting the images according to albums, tags, dates or searches. To enter digiKam's viewing and editing mode, double-click an image thumbnail.

KDE's amaroK music player allows you to play various audio formats, create playlists, import music from an iPod* (or upload files to your iPod), and listen to streaming audio broadcasts of radio stations on the Internet. The file types supported depend on the engine used for amaroK.

To start amaroK, press Alt+F2 and enter amarok. On first start, amaroK launches a First-Run Wizard with which to define the folders where amaroK should look for your music files.

amaroK's main window shows a sidebar on the left providing different views: your music collection, a context browser, your playlists, a file browser, etc. The right part of the window shows the current playlist. To play music, just drag and drop items from any of the sidebar browsers to the playlist area. Double-click an item in the playlist to start playback.

If your music files are properly tagged (containing at least information about the artist and album), you can make use of several nice amaroK features. To automatically fetch the album cover images from Amazon, select Tools+Cover Manager and click Fetch Missing Covers. The next time you play a track from this album, the cover is displayed in the context browser and on the on-screen display. To learn more about the artist, switch to the Context browser in the sidebar. Click the Artist tab to make amaroK search for the appropriate Wikipedia article, which is then displayed in the context browser. To view a track's lyrics, click the Lyrics tab to start a search and display the results.

To configure the use of another engine (or various other amaroK features), select Settings+Configure amaroK.

Whereas the KDE Control Center is only for configuring your KDE desktop, you can change the installation and the configuration of your whole system with YaST. Therefore, administrator (root) permission is required to open YaST.

YaST holds various modules for adjusting your system settings. They are subdivided into the following categories:

Software: Use the modules of this category to set certain options for installation and update and to install or remove software packages.

Hardware: Use these modules to configure the hardware of your computer, such as monitor, keyboard, mouse, printer, or scanner.

System: With these modules, you can change system settings, such as date, time, or language, and perform tasks, such as backup or restoration of files.

Network Devices: Use these modules to configure your network devices, such as network cards, ISDN, DSL, or modem.

Network Services: These modules are for network services and for configuring several clients, such as LDAP and NFS clients.

Novell AppArmor: Use the modules of this category to configure the Novell AppArmor application security system.

Security and Users: Here, you can configure security aspects, such as the firewall options, and create and manage users and groups.

Miscellaneous: Holds several modules that cannot easily be classified into the first six module groups. For example, you can view log files, read the release notes and install drivers from a vendor CD.

To open YaST, press Alt+F2 and enter yast. A dialog opens in which to enter the root password. The YaST modules offer integrated online help texts.

Printers can either be connected to your system locally or accessed over a network. To use a local printer, make sure that it is connected to your machine. Shut down the system before connecting a non-USB printer to your system.

You can configure printers with YaST. Start YaST and select Hardware+Printer in the YaST control center. This opens the main printer configuration window. If autodetection of printing devices fails, click Add in the Printer Configuration dialog to start the manual configuration workflow. Follow the instructions in the YaST online help. If you are not sure which option to choose and which information to enter, ask your system administrator.

After configuring a printing device correctly, you can address it from any application.

When you are finished using the computer, you can log out and leave the system running or restart or shut down the computer. Click the main menu button on your panel and select Log Out. If you want to leave the system running, click End Current Session in the dialog that opens. Otherwise, click Turn Off Computer.

This guide gave you a short introduction to the KDE desktop and some key applications running on it. To discover more, refer to KDE User Guide and the other manuals available for SUSE Linux Enterprise at http://www.novell.com/documentation/sled10/ or in your installed system under /usr/share/doc/manual.

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