Apparently, Gnome will automatically detect changes in the wallpaper image file, and update the desktop accordingly. No joy with KDE4 – apparently the devs assume we’ll never change the image . Fortunately, there’s a way to “trick” the KDE4 wallpaper rotator into updating the wallpaper with the latest sun map image.

First, create a folder to contain the sun map images, I created /usr/share/wallpapers/worldmap . Next, setup a cron job to automatically pull the updated image. Run “sudo crontab -e” in a terminal. This will start you editing root’s cron file. Paste the following as it’s own line in the cron file (Shift+Insert usually acts as paste for CLI editors):

10 * * * * wget http://www.opentopia.com/images/cams/world_sunlight_map_rectangular.jpg -O- | convert - -scale 1440x900 /usr/share/wallpapers/worldmap/worldmap.png && cp /usr/share/wallpapers/worldmap/worldmap.png /usr/share/wallpapers/worldmap/worldmap1.png

Be sure that it’s all on one line, and be sure to edit the -scale option for the convert command to match your own screen resolution, and the directory paths to match your directory. Save and exit. This command will pull the sun map image from the server that maintains it, and run it through the convert command to rescale it and convert it to a PNG image. Then, it will copy the output file to a file in the same directory with a different name. The cron options (the “10 * * * *”) specify that the command will be run ten minutes after every hour (apparently the map image is updated shortly after every hour).

Alternatively, you can copy and paste the following into a plain text file, add the proper permissions to make the file executable (chmod +x file), and use whatever scheduling software you like to run the script shortly after every hour:

#!/bin/bash

dir="/usr/share/wallpapers/worldmap"
file="worldmap"
file2="worldmap1"
format="png"
scale="1440x900"

wget http://www.opentopia.com/images/cams/world_sunlight_map_rectangular.jpg -O- | convert - -scale ${scale} ${dir}/${file}.${format}
cp ${dir}/${file}.${format} ${dir}/${file2}.${format}

This script does the same thing, but in a more easily customizable form.

Once you have the script setup, run it once to get the initial files, and point KDE4’s wallpaper slideshow to the directory containing the two files. It will loop through the two files (both of which are updated every hour), constantly updating your wallpaper with the changes.

For most plasmoids, you either get it with the default plasma installation, or you can install the extragear-plasma package. (As of Kubuntu Hardy Heron) Neither one of these has a replacement for the quicklaunch menu. The QuickLauncher plasmoid is available from the plasmoids section of KDE-Look.org. The author currently offers a source tarball as well as packages for Kubuntu Hardy (x86) and Mandriva (x86, amd64, and “source-RPM”).

The plasmoid still has some quirks that require you to edit configuration files. Add it to your desktop, and it is initially empty, with no indication of its existence. I haven’t tried using it with the panel, perhaps someone can enlighten me on that point. To initially populate it, open up a file manager to /usr/share/applications. This will have a bunch of .desktop files which link to various applications. It may also have one or two “kde” directories, which contain KDE3- or KDE4-specific applications. Choose your initial quicklaunch application and copy the .desktop file’s path (like /usr/share/applications/kde/konqbrowser.desktop for Konqueror). Open a text editor, such as Kate, and open the file ~/.kde4/share/config/plasma-appletsrc . Don’t edit it yet. Press Alt+F2 to bring up the application runner, type “kquitapp plasma”, press the Launch button, and don’t panic. This will shutdown the plasma desktop (causing the plasmoids and panel to disappear), but your windows (and window manager) should stay where they are. Click inside the Kate window, and Kate should tell you that the plasma-appletsrc file has changed. Choose to reload it.

If you haven’t removed the “invisible” quicklaunch plasmoid yet, you should see a section near the bottom of the file that looks like this:

[Containments][1][Applets][85]
geometry=169,520,24,48
locked=false
plugin=quicklauncher

Note the plugin=quicklauncher line, telling you that this section controls the parameters for the QuickLauncher plasmoid. Paste the path to your .desktop file a couple of lines below this section, and add “iconUrls=” before it, like so:

iconUrls=/usr/share/applications/kde/konqbrowser.desktop

Copy the first line of the section you located, and paste it one line above the iconUrls line. Then add “[Configuration]” to the end. The final section should look something like this:

[Containments][1][Applets][85][Configuration]
iconUrls=/usr/share/applications/kde/konqbrowser.desktop

Save the file, press Alt+F2 again, type “plasma”, and click Launch. Plasma should load, and you should have the Konqueror icon sitting on your desktop, waiting to be clicked.

To add more shortcuts to QuickLauncher, simply re-open Konqueror to /usr/share/applications , and drag-and-drop any .desktop files on top of the existing icon(s) in the QuickLauncher. You can also drag-and-drop to re-organize the icons within the launcher. To remove an icon, right-click the icon and choose “Remove Icon” from the menu.

The configuration dialog for QuickLauncher allows you to choose how many rows it has and how many visible icons it shows. For a single-row quicklauncher, set “rows” to 1 (obviously enough). For a one-column quicklauncher (my current preference), set “rows” equal to or greater than the number of icons you have.

With the release of Hardy Heron, many X/K/Ubuntu users will upgrade to the new version. Many already have. While an actual upgrade is possible, my preferred method of “upgrading” is through a fresh install. This resets everything to “factory settings”, as it were, getting rid of any junk left lying around from your various tweakings. A fresh start, so to speak. But what about your already carefully-crafted desktop experience? In my experience, I’ve found that there are a number of things you can do to maintain your desktop through a fresh install.

The main thing you’ll want to do is create a /home partition. PsychoCats has an excellent guide on moving your existing home directory. On my system (60GB hard drive), I have allocated about 5GB to my root ( / ) partition, various small amounts to a couple of other partitions, and the rest to my /home partition. Currently (using Kubuntu Gutsy and after installing/uninstalling several programs), I use about 4GB of that 5GB. The benefits of a separate /home partition is that, since all your personal settings and files are stored there, you can safely leave that data untouched during the install.

The next thing to do is to backup all your system-wide settings. This includes your wallpapers (if you’re into that sorta thing), sources.list, xorg.conf, fstab, and possibly your grub menu.lst. These are the main things that normally need reconfigured after a fresh install. You can create a new directory on your desktop (which won’t be erased if you have a separate partition for it), and put all the backups in there, so they’re easy to get to when you’re ready to restore them.

If you’re into collecting wallpapers, you’ll likely want to backup your collection. Whenever I switch to a new wallpaper, I first put it in /usr/share/wallpapers. If you do the same, you can simply copy this folder to the new folder on your desktop. For the rest of the backups, just copy /etc/apt/sources.list, /etc/X11/xorg.conf, /etc/fstab, and /boot/grub/menu.lst to the folder on your desktop. You can use the folowing commands to do it all relatively quickly:

$ cd ~/Desktop/
$ mkdir backups
$ cp -r /usr/share/wallpapers /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/fstab /boot/grub/menu.lst ~/Desktop/backups/

A quick explanation of the files to backup: the sources.list tells apt-get where to search for available software. I use several programs which are not in the official Ubuntu repos, and this usually involves adding third-party repos to my sources.list file. I like to back this file up so I don’t have to go hunting yet again for the repo info.

The xorg.conf file holds your display settings and other settings relating to on-screen display (such as mouse configuration). Every time I reinstall on my notebook, I have to go in and manually modify the xorg.conf file to enable horizontal scrolling on my synaptics touchpad. Backing up the file allows for quick and easy editing, instead of trying to remember my settings.

Fstab specifies automount details for various partitions. I have two partitions other than my root and home partitions that are setup to automount, as well as several Windows shares that are specified in fstab so as to automate mounting them.

You really only want to backup your grub menu.lst if you have manually modified it for whatever reason (for example, if you have a dedicated grub boot partition). If you normally let Ubuntu auto-config the boot options and don’t touch it afterwards, you probably don’t need or want to back it up.

Install X/K/Ubuntu as normal, specifying your home and root partitions, and ensuring that the installer does NOT format the home partition. You will be required to format the root partition. During the install, you will also want to create any user accounts that you had before, in the same order that you previously created them. User recreation can also be done after you boot into your fresh install, by using the useradd and usermod commands.

After the install, boot into your shiny new installation. Since you’ll need to use root privileges (sudo) to re-integrate your files, you may want to log into a fail-safe desktop. This will give you a command line window, but no window decorations, panels, etc. You won’t need them anyway, yet. To view the contents of files, use the “nano” text editor. Do not simply copy all the files back to their original positions. When a distro is upgraded (or reinstalled), system files have a tendency to get modified (case in point: your sources.list). What you want to do is compare the differences between the old and new files, and make changes as appropriate.

First, move your wallpapers back. You can do this without deleting any new, “official” wallpapers by running the command

$ sudo cp -r ~/Desktop/backups/wallpapers/* /usr/share/wallpapers/

For the sources.list…well…I don’t know of any good way to check for updated repos, other than to change the “gutsy” to “hardy” for each repo line, and run “apt-get update”. If the repo doesn’t exist, you’ll get some output like:

Ign http://repo.freecreations.info hardy Release.gpg
Ign http://repo.freecreations.info hardy/freeverse Translation-en_US
Ign http://repo.freecreations.info hardy Release
Ign http://repo.freecreations.info hardy/freeverse Packages
Err http://repo.freecreations.info hardy/freeverse Packages
  404 Not Found

From there, you could try to pull software from your previously-used gutsy repos, but I really have no clue how stable that would be

Moving on to xorg.conf. Simply look into your backup file, find out the settings you want, and add those to the appropriate places in the new xorg.conf. You will need to use sudo to edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf with root privileges. The same goes for your grub menu.lst.

For fstab, unless you made some change to your partitions between backing up and reinstalling, you should be able to simply “sudo cp” your old fstab over your new fstab. Of course, you should backup the new fstab, just to be safe, and compare all the numbers afterwards to make sure everything will work after your next reboot.

Now that you’ve restored all your settings, you should be able to reboot, log into your normal session, and enjoy your familiar desktop experience under the new distro. After reinstalling all your software, of course

If you find any part of this guide to be lacking in detail, first use Google, secondly email me at andrew at techknack.net or post in the comments. As of this post, I have not, myself, upgraded to Hardy, but I did use this very method to upgrade from Feisty to Gutsy, and I believe this process to still be good for the current distros.

That’s right, it’s time for a technologically controversial post.

Compiz is the ultimate in eyecandy. Seriously. With wobbly windows; various window-switching mechanisms such as shift-switcher, ring-swither, and regular tab-switcher; a multi-desktop cube; Mac Expose-style effects; some wicked screensavers; and a whole array of window opening, closing, minimizing, focus/unfocus, etc animations, it clearly outshines Vista and OS X combined. It’s also pretty darn efficient – as I type this, Compiz is using no more than 12MB of memory, and I rarely reboot my machine.

However, as cool as it is, I find myself using very, very few of the available plugins in my daily workflow. With my current setup, I have all three window switchers; a four-desktop cube; wobbly windows; open/close “glide”, minimize/unminimize “genie”, and focus/unfocus “fade” animations; current-desktop and all-desktop Expose effect; show desktop; and the spinning cube screensaver enabled. Of all these functions, though, I only use the cube regularly. I have it setup so that Alt+Ctrl+Left/Right arrow spins the cube, and I use that for switching between desktops. For switching between windows? I use Avant Window Navigator. With an icon for each window, I just click on the one I need to go to. And, of course, the animations, screensaver, and wobbly windows are ever-present and fairly unobtrusive. I just find that the majority of the available effects aren’t useful in my everyday workflow. I mean, fish inside my cube? Drawing on my screen with fire? Not only not useful, but a nonproductive use of resources.

I suppose the purpose of having so many effects, other than sheer amount of eyecandy, is choice. However, choice or not, a lot of the effects are just plain useless, such as the aforementioned Aquarium plugin.

What plugins do you use on a daily basis, if any? And which plugins do you have enabled that merely gather dust?

Turns out that part of the KDE4 install process adds a path to the beginning of your PATH variable, /usr/lib/kde4/bin. This is where all the “xxxxxx-kde4″ apps reside, ready to spring to life when you type their name. Putting the KDE4 apps aside and bringing the older, more familiar versions to the forefront is a simple matter of renaming and symlinking.

For this example, we’ll use Kopete. First, move the offending KDE4 version out of the way; execute the following command:

$ sudo mv /usr/lib/kde4/bin/kopete /usr/lib/kde4/bin/kopete-kde4

This renames the program to “kopete-kde4″, so you can still start the program if you need to. Next, we symlink (create a shortcut to) the “standard” kopete:

$ sudo ln -s /usr/bin/kopete /usr/lib/kde4/bin/

This basically says “create a soft link to /usr/bin/kopete in the /usr/lib/kde4/bin directory”. The resulting link file will also be named kopete, letting you call the KDE3 version normally.

While this method works well for smaller apps (Kopete, Konsole, etc), I haven’t been able to trust it with more essential programs, such as KDM. KDM has been especially annoying; supposedly you can configure it to use the old KDM by running “sudo dpkg-reconfigure kdm” and choosing “kdm” from the menu, but this hasn’t worked for me, and I’ve tried several times.

The good news is that it is possible, even easy, to add filetypes to Konqueror’s “Create new” menu. Best of all, it only requires adding a couple of files to an existing directory.

The entries in the “Create new” menu are actually called “templates”. Which makes sense, since the newly created file is nothing more than a blank template to which you add content. The files that make up the menu entries are .desktop files located at /usr/share/templates/. The .desktop files point to template files located at /usr/share/templates/.sources, a hidden directory inside the templates directory. For my example, I’m going to add a .doc file template, since it is so often used in school. The basic idea can be applied to any file type, though.

First, open the program which can create the file you want to add (in this case, OpenOffice Writer). Create a new, blank document, and “Save as” the appropriate file (be sure to choose the .doc extension, not .odf) in an easily-accessible place (meaning user-accessible, a good place would be your desktop). I believe the name of the template file is used as the default name of the new document, though it will ask you for a filename before creating the file; I simply named my file “MS Word 2003 Doc.doc”. After the template is created, fire up a command line and use

$ sudo mv "~/Desktop/MS Word 2003 Doc.doc" /usr/share/templates/.sources/

to move the template into its new permanent residence. Now go up a level to /usr/share/templates/. You will need root privileges of some sort (either a konqueror instance running under root, or sudoing at the command line). Copy one of the existing .desktop files (I recommend a filetype-specific file, such as the HTMLFile.desktop or TextFile.desktop files) to something like MSDoc.desktop. Open the new file for editing with root privileges (from a command line,

$ kdesu kate /usr/share/templates/MSDoc.desktop &

). Now you can either delete all the nonessential lines of foreign language code (keeping one line of each of Encoding, Name, Comment, Type, URL, and Icon instructions), and edit the remainder to fit your preferences, or you can copy my file’s contents and paste it into your file:

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=MS Word 2003 Document...
Comment=Enter Document name:
Type=Link
URL=.source/MS Word 2003 Doc.doc
Icon=document

I leave the Encoding line as-is from the HTMLFile.desktop file I copied it from. Name is the text that will show up in the menu. Comment is the text that will prompt for the new file’s name. Type=Link specifies that this file is a link to another file (leave as is). URL points to the template file (which resides in the .source directory). Icon specifies what icon will be used in to identify the file type in the “Create new” menu. For Icon, “document” gives the file the icon associated with document files. The Icon for TextFile.desktop is “txt”, and for HTMLFile.desktop, “html”. I don’t know how to go about finding the correct word form other filetypes, other than experimentation. A couple that seem to work for me include “spreadsheet” for a spreadsheet icon, “openofficeorg23-oasis-presentation” for the Oasis icon for OO Impress. One thing to try would be to open KControl, go to KDE Components -> File Associations, click on any mime type, and click the filetype’s icon on the right. You should be taken to the Icon chooser. Select “Mime types” from the dropdown, and search for portions of keywords that match the icon you’re looking for. Do not click any icons. To get the name of an icon, hover over the icon, and the chooser should give you a tooltip with the icon’s name. Use that name in the .desktop file, and it should present that icon in the “Create new” menu.

If you followed everything correctly, you should now have an entry in Konqueror’s “Create new” menu for creating a new .doc file. To recap:

1. Create a blank template file
2. Move the template file to /usr/share/templates/.source/
3. Create a .desktop file in /usr/share/templates/ with the appropriate values
4. Enjoy your new file-creation capabilities!

To extend functionality, you can, obviously, add template content to your template files. For example, if you develop websites and you’re tired of always looking up the correct doctype declaration, you can build an html template file, complete with doctype, and simply create it from the Konqueror context menu. In fact, the existing HTMLFile.html file in my .source directory already has the basic structure of a standard web page. Of course, this isjust an example, and could be applied to other filetypes.

The main changes I’ve noticed since the update is some changed and some missing functionality. The “Add widget” area is no longer; it has been replaced with a “zoom zone”. When hovered over, the area expands and gives you a “Zoom out” button. This zooms the desktop out to show all four (or however many) desktops on the screen. To zoom out, you must hover over the corner area again (which is now half as large and in the corner of each “desktop”), though this presents two buttons: one to zoom in by another factor of two, and one to zoom back out to normal. I tried the second zoom factor, and was scared I might not be able to get back . Seriously, though, it doesn’t work (at all) with compiz; as such, I have no use for it. Fortunately, the “retracted” form of the area is grayed out and unobtrusive. To add plasmoids, you must first unlock them (right-click the Desktop > Unlock widgets), then call up the “add widgets” dialogue (right-click desktop > Add widgets…).

Some of the widgets seem to have had an update as well; most notably, the Digital Clock widget, which I use daily. The change: I no longer have the choice to view a 12-hour clock rather than the default 24-hour clock. Oops.

One nice thing I just noticed: in 4.0.0, whilst dragging plasmoids, if your mouse moved behind a window, the plasmoid would lose focus. You had to go around the open windows to move the plasmoids around. No longer; the plasmoid will continue moving unless you let go of the mouse button. Even behind windows.

Another small plasmoid change, affecting all widgets, is that the per-plasmoid rotate/resize button has been split into individual resize and rotate buttons. It makes sense, but it’s slightly annoying for me, since I was used to using the both-in-one button. And it adds clutter to the plasmoid interface. But, it’s livable.

I haven’t noticed any other changes yet (other than the kde4 apps taking over the kde3.x apps), but I haven’t exactly dug deep into the bowels of the available settings.

Overall, the change isn’t too drastic (what’d I expect — it’s only a .0.1 update). I miss the 12-hour clock, but that’s a fault with the plasmoid’s developer(s), not the Plasma devs. The change in functionality of the corner area (the “zoom zone” at the moment) is slightly disturbing — does the KDE team not know what to do with this area? I would suggest making it a button for the Ctrl+F12 feature (an OS X-style “bring widgets to top and darken the background” feature) and bringing back the “Add widgets” button. The plasmoid resize/rotate button split is the tiniest bit annoying, but livable.

And I eagerly await the day I can choose which widgets are always below and always on top

Update: I’m afraid I must apologize for being a bit hasty in my “judgments”, as it were. Like my first KDE4 article, this was a “first impressions”-style writeup, detailing the first things I noticed after updating. I have since (at the prompting of my commenters ) delved a bit deeper into the update to do what I want to do.
while the 12-hour switch in the digital clock plasmoid is a missed feature, ravencrow kindly pointed out that you can switch time modes through the “Regional & Language” section of the KDE System Settings. Select the “Time & Dates” tab, and enter “pH:MM:SS AMPM” for the “Date Format” field. You’ll have to restart the X server for the change to take effect, but this will let the clock plasmoid display 12-hour formats again. Yay!
As pdx and Sokraates mentioned, and as I so hastily overlooked, the “add widgets” button is still present in the upper-right-hand corner, though you must “unlock widgets” before it will display.

Additional links:
Tux Enclave: KDE 4.0.1 Is Now Available

KDE4 is a complete rewrite of the K Desktop Environment: a new hardware abstraction layer (Solid instead of HAL), a new multimedia layer (Phonon instead of aRts), and, with a new desktop shell (Plasma), a radically different desktop experience.

The first thing you’ll notice is that all of your icons are suddenly…plasmoided. In Plasma, everything on the desktop is a plasmoid (read: shiny widget). Everything. Well, except for the desktop itself and the panel, which are both plugins. But your icons, clock, taskbar, system tray, even your kicker menu, they’re all plasmoids. Unfortunately, this means that deleting a plasmoided icon from your desktop doesn’t delete the corresponding file from your desktop directory. To do that, you’ll have to fire up the new file manager, Dolphin.

The other change you’ll notice, though not as obvious, is a small “icon” in the upper-right of the screen, used for bringing up the “add widgets” dialogue. Strangely enough, the full splendor of plasmoids isn’t shown by default; all the default plasmoids (other than your icons) are embedded in a panel at the bottom of the screen.
Oh, yeah, one other thing: the Oxygen theme. The KDE artwork team has come up with a new KWin theme, called Oxygen, which seems to be strangely Vista-esque. The Oxygen icons, however, are very nice and unique.


To add a plasmoid to the desktop, open the “Add widgets” dialogue, find your plasmoid from the list, and drag it from the list to your desktop (or to the panel, if you wish). To remove a plasmoid from the desktop, simply hover over it and click the red X that pops up (if you don’t see a red X, make sure your plasmoids aren’t locked [right-click desktop->unlock widgets]). To remove a plasmoid from the panel, right-click the offending plasmoid and select “Remove this [plasmoid name]“.

A right-click on the desktop, though not currently as robust as KDE3.x’s, gives you the option to “Configure desktop…”. This brings up a fairly simple dialogue that allows you to change wallpapers, wallpaper positioning, background color, and whether or not to show desktop icons. I’ve found that disabling the “Show icons” option simply closes all currently open icon plasmoids; anytime you add a file to your desktop directory, a trusty plasmoid pops up on your desktop for it.

I’ve also heard that Plasma has in-built compositing support. I wasn’t able to get all the effects to work, and the ones I could get working weren’t customizable to my liking. Thankfully, Compiz still works pretty perfectly.

Overall, it’s a nice new desktop experience. It’s a bit lacking in features at the moment, but that’s because it’s still in “beta mode”; the 4.0 feature cutoff left “a lot of 90% done stuff”. The next release, 4.1, should bring a lot more functionality and customizability.

Additional links:
My January Desktop Screenshot
KDE 4.0.0 Emergency FAQ
KDE4 Visual Guide
Remove the KDE4 panel
LifeHacker: Design Your Own Desktop With KDE4

Wikipedia:
In addition to what is provided by the computer’s physical hardware display, virtual desktops provide a “virtual” space, in which the user can place their applications’ windows. Each virtual desktop occupies a defined portion of the screen arranged in a matrix or grid. Application windows and icons can be moved between desktops, increasing a user’s ability to organize their windowed applications that are currently running by reducing clutter.

According to Wikipedia (the biggest source for popular knowledge), Virtual Desktops were first introduced in 1985 by the Amiga operating system.

I’ve never heard of Amiga, but Linux systems have had “native support” for virtual desktops since the GNOME and KDE environments introduced the idea (date unknown). Boot up almost any Linux Live CD, and you are guaranteed at least two virtual desktops to play around with.

Apple recently integrated virtual desktops as “Spaces” in Mac OS X Leopard. Complete with a shiny interface for switching back and forth between spaces.

Windows…has yet to catch up. Per usual.

On the bright side, however, there are many third-party programs that allow the Windows user to have VDs. Most of these programs are free, many are GPL, and all have at least one problem. You can try out the entire list from Wikipedia until you find one that works for you, but my preference is Compass.

Compass is “dead” since 2001, as the author puts it, but its code is available under GPL. This is very fortunate, since I believe it could still use some work. But before I go on, here’s the feature list from the webpage:

• Themeing – 3 themes and a template included
• Multi-desktop support – Not limited to 1 pager
• Multi-quadrant support – Have as many virtual desktops as you want
• Want your pager to be always on-top? on-bottom?
• Move windows around using the pager window
• Mark sticky windows
• Hotkey support

Theming capabilities are always a plus (and the template is a PSD file, compatible with GIMP).
I haven’t tried the multi-desktop support, but it sounds like a nice feature for those with dual-monitor setups.
As many desktops as I want? Nice.
The always-on-top-or-bottom feature is nice, but this can cause problems.
Move windows from desktop to desktop using the interface – very useful.
Sticky windows; good for keeping WinAMP, various Yahoo! widgets, and RKLauncher on every desktop.
Hotkey support; what keys do you switch with? Ctrl+Alt+Arrow? Win+Arrow? F? Spacebar?

While the app still works under Windows XP (dunno about Vista), it is lacking in a few features that would make it near-perfect:

• Autohide: the always-on-top feature is nice, but without an autohide feature, it tends to get in the way at times.
• Any-desktop window moving: you can only move windows from the current desktop to another desktop; inactive desktops are automatically switched to when you click, there is no way to drag windows amongst inactive desktops.
• It touched my registry! While I don’t mind a program storing settings in my registry if I’ve installed it, an app like this should be getting its settings from a file (which would also make it perfect as a portable app!). If you want more than the default of two virtual desktops, you have to merge a reg file.

In spite of these shortfalls, Compass is probably the best Windows VD manager I’ve come across. No fancy 3D cube effects, but it works. Better yet, my feature requests shouldn’t be too hard to add, given that “the code is straightforward C and Win32″. This’ll probably be a good summer break project for me

So, do you use a VDM under Windows? If so, which one? And what do you want in a VDM that isn’t offered by Compass? Leave a comment!

OpenOffice.org Portable is a great little office suite, ideal for working with documents on the go. Unfortunately, while the download is only around 70MB, the full install is 181MB, which may be more than you want to give up — or even more than you have available, after installing your other portable apps. Fortunately, the full install comes with some fairly large nonessential files that can be gotten rid of

This guide assumes you’ve installed OOoP to the directory “\OOP”.

Dictionary files
These files are used for spellchecking. Languages that come in the default installation (to the best of my knowledge), are: three variations of German (de_*), two variations of English (en_*), Hungarian (hu_*), Italian (it_*), Dutch (nl_*), Swahili (sw_*), and Thai (th_*). (language codes , two-letter codes are under the ISO639-1 list).
While all these languages are nice, I know that, unless I get a German penpal or something, I won’t be needing anything other than English, and it’s reasonably safe to delete the other dictionary files to save space.
The dictionary files can be found in the \OOP\App\openoffice\share\dict\ooo directory. Files you want to delete are in the following formats (the asterisk [*] is a wildcard, in most of the following cases indicating one of the two-letter language codes):

• *_*.aff
• *_*.dic
• hyph_*_*.dic
• README_*_*.txt
• th_*_*.dat
• th_*_*.idx

For my intallation (keeping only the US English dictionary), I kept only the files DictOOo.sxw, dictionary.lst, en_US.aff, en_US.dic, FontOOo.sxw, hyph_en_US.dic, and WordNet_license.txt. This cleared up about 52MB. You may also want to keep the files th_en_US_v2.dat and th_en_US_v2.idx, which seem to be either word definition or thesaurus files, but they will add an extra 20MB to your setup.

Templates
I know that some people out there use templates when creating new documents, but I’m not one of those people. I just create a new document, maybe set up its margins and stuff, and start typing. If you don’t use templates, either, you can delete the entire \OOP\App\openoffice\share\template directory, to save almost 8MB.

Gallery
I really don’t know what this directory would be used for in the OOoP program, but a quick look at the files inside indicates that it’s not important for daily document-editing rituals. Delete \OOP\App\openoffice\share\gallery to save almost 5MB

READMEs
If you have no use for the README files, delete \OOP\App\openoffice\share\readme to save a whopping 76KB

Help Files
You may actually want to keep the help files, located in \OOP\App\openoffice\help , in case you ever need a quick how-to or what-is on something in the program. If not, delete the directory to save 22MB

Java “class” files
OOoP comes with the option to add java support, but I haven’t yet seen the need to have this support. If you don’t care for Java support, either, delete \OOP\App\openoffice\program\classes to save 8.5MB

Extraneous Icon Sets
OOoP comes with a few nice icon sets that you can customize your toolbars with, but the cost is 18MB in icon set files. Open Writer, Calc, or another OOoP program, look through the icon sets (Tools->Options…, then OpenOffice.org->view in the left pane, in Writer). Once you’ve found an icon set you like, go to \OOP\App\openoffice\share\config and delete the three images_*.zip files that you DON’T want. I chose to keep the Crystal icon set, images_crystal.zip. This saves around 13MB

And that’s it! You should now have slimmed your OpenOffice.org Portable installation from 181MB to 70-75MB. Congratulations