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4. The power of an integrated desktop

In this section we would like to take you through a couple of practical exercises which should nicely demonstrate how powerful the K Desktop Environment really is.

4.1 Using KDE applications

Begin by clicking on the Go! button on the panel and traversing the menu with your pointer until you reach 'Applications', then select KEdit. This action should start an instance of KEdit, a simple text editor provided with the K Desktop Environment. Make sure KEdit has focus by single-clicking once on its titlebar. Now create a short text document by typing any sentence you like, perhaps the one you are reading right now would be a good choice. Let's save your work by choosing 'Save' from the 'File' menu. Once the file-dialog has come up, make sure you are in your home-directory and save the test document as 'My Document' to your home-directory. Close KEdit by choosing 'Exit' from KEdit's 'File' menu.

Having created and saved a little text document, which we named 'My Document', let us explore a number of different ways of opening this text document.

Open a folder window on your desktop and navigate through it until you it displays the contents of you home-directory. You should know see an icon depicting a few pages and a pencil with the name 'My Document'. The fact that your document was assigned this particular icon indicates that KDE correctly recognized your document as a text document. Simply single-click on the icon to open an instance of KEdit displaying the contents of our test document 'My Document'. Easy, right?

Let us explore another way of opening our test text document.

Open an instance of KEdit by choosing KEdit from the 'Applications' entry on the Go! menu. Now click on our test document in the still open folder window and drag the pointer over to KEdit releasing the left mouse button only over KEdit's white text area. As you can see our test document is being opened in KEdit. This operation is called 'Drag and Drop' and is supported by many KDE applications.

Having observed how KEdit behaves if you drag and drop a text document icon onto it, you will probably not be surprised to find that you can drag and drop faxes onto KFax and binary documents onto KHexEdit in order to open them. You might however be surprise to learn that you can drag and drop documents and folders onto kvt the KDE Desktop terminal. Try it out and see observe what happens!

4.2 Transparent Internet access

If you are experienced with contemporary desktop environments, much of the above might not surprise you, in fact you would probably expect a powerful contemporary desktop to provide the features mentioned. KDE however goes one step further than this. It provides transparent access to the Internet. Let us show you what we mean:

Open a desktop folder and chose 'Open Location' from the 'File' menu. Type the url: ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde . As you know from the section introducing the KDE file-manager kfm, this will open an ftp sessions nd display the contents of the pub/kde directory of ftp.kde.org in the folder window.

Now let us open in instance of KEdit. Once KEdit is started 'drag and drop' the file named 'Message' onto KEdit. Within a few seconds you should have a copy of it displayed in the text area of KEdit. How is that for network transparency?

Feel free to explore KEdit's 'Save Url' function to learn how to save text documents to remote sites.


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