Backtrack 5 KDE Effects

[r00tb33r]

Hello,

I just downloaded Backtrack 5 and had some questions about the new way the appearance settings are organized. In Backtrack 4 r2 there was one interface where you could access all of the settings from. Now there are about 4.
Whenever you click something this really annoying icon bounces around with your cursor; can you disable that? There is also a glow around the windows; can you change the color of the glow? It looks bad red on a say, green background. When you auto-hide the taskbar it takes about an eon for it to move into position, which might look flashy, but is not very useful; can I disable that too? Also, the login screen manager crashes whenever I access it.

Anyway, I have to congratulate you on a lot of other things that I don't have time to mention.

Thanks.

[Deadboy]

The red glow around windows can be changed in: Settings > System Settings > Workspace Appearance > Window Decorations ; you'll see a list of windows decorations, you can choose a new one, or scroll down to "Oxygen" and click to highlight, then click "Configure Decoration". The red color is under the "Shadow" tab. You can change it to any color you like.

Disabling "Various Animations" from above may fix your task bar auto-hide problem too but if not, it's somewhere in destop effects I'd imagine.

I'm not sure about your login screen. Are you using multiple users? You shouldn't see a KDE login screen if you're booting properly.

[r00tb33r]

Hey thanks Deadboy,

Disabling the various effects seemed to speed up my vm a little, but it's not how you stop the bouncing cursor. I figured out that you got to:

BT START MENU>SETTINGS>SYSTEM SETTINGS>APPLICATION AND SYSTEM NOTIFICATIONS>LAUNCH FEEDBACK>BUSY CURSOR >> Set to No Busy Cursor.

Also, you are absolutely right about the glow effect. Thanks. I still can't seem to figure out the auto-hide timing thing. The reason I use it is because I set my right-click to open the app launcher and often have no need of the taskbar. But, when windows are maximized or I want to check the clock (which doesn't work right now) I can go down there and pop it up. (I set the middle button to what the right-click usually is set to.) In Backtrack 4 r2 you could set the taskbar to "immediately" hide and show when you hovered over it.

About the login screen: I don't have multiple users but you can still change it to look like the Windows login screen or whatever other skins they have. Whenever I click it, it crashes.

There is something called the System settings handbook which is missing because of an improper configuration, but it should be accessible by going to the HELP tab and clicking System Settings handbook.

Here is a helpful link to some other features of the Plasma desktop: http://www.kde.org/announcements/4.0/desktop.php Some of the cool ones are alt F2 for an app launcher sort of like launchy and ctrl F8 for a Mac like desktop switcher.

[Deadboy]

Hey thanks Deadboy,

Disabling the various effects seemed to speed up my vm a little, but it's not how you stop the bouncing cursor. I figured out that you got to:

BT START MENU>SETTINGS>SYSTEM SETTINGS>APPLICATION AND SYSTEM NOTIFICATIONS>LAUNCH FEEDBACK>BUSY CURSOR >> Set to No Busy Cursor.

Ah yeah, you beat me to it. I noticed it afterward and was going to edit my post. Glad you figured it out.

Here is a helpful link to some other features of the Plasma desktop: http://www.kde.org/announcements/4.0/desktop.php Some of the cool ones are alt F2 for an app launcher sort of like launchy and ctrl F8 for a Mac like desktop switcher.

Good stuff, thanks! I also found a helpful tip to make apps look better under KDE.

apt-get install gtk-chtheme qtcurve

then: Alt + F2 and enter gtk-chtheme. Choose QtCurve and Apply. That should help the overall look of many apps like Synaptic under KDE.

Before:



After:

[kafteras]

I dont know why or how but i managed to screw the effects twice. What i mean is that the opengl stop working, giving error that it failed to start due to some configuration problem, and the "All Effects" tab went blank.
First time i didnt find and workout so i just reinstall the distro. Second time i finally found the problem: root@bt:~# XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS=0
Dunno how it went to "1" but that screwed the effects.
So here it is if any1 have the same problem

[r00tb33r]

Yeah that really does looks a lot nicer.

I have made some findings about taskbar timing. It is either one of two things. First I (suspended) disabled all of the effects. I've noticed KDE/Plamsa does not like going between effects mode and no effects mode. It's kind of screwy. Anyway, there is also a file called "plasma-desktop-appletsrc" located in ~./kde/share/config that has a taskbar value called zvalue. I have no idea what it does, but when I changed it from "6" to "0" the taskbar hid automatically. However, when I set it back to "6" the taskbar did not go back up slowly, but still went up automatically. All I know is that the taskbar works like I want it to and I'm not completely sure why.

Also, if you want the manuals to almost every kde supported app and some sweet Unix manual pages, then you should go ahead and run:

apt-get install kdehelpcenter4

You'll be glad you did and your stay in KDE/Plasma will be much nicer.

Lastly, some people should definitely build a Backtrack index page for this application. The whole file structure is there we just need the documents to support the tools.