How do I set the language used by &kde;? There are two ways to set the language &kde; uses in the messages it will display: Using the &kde; Control Centre Fire up the &kde; Control Centre and select Regional & Accessibility followed by Country/Region & Language. You can select your language and location here. If &kde; cannot find a translation in the first language chosen, it will fall back on the default language. This is usually (American) English by default. Using the &kde; Control Centre is the preferred way of choosing languages in &kde;. Using the LANG environment variable The second method uses the standard locale setting on your system. To change the language, simply set the environment variable LANG accordingly. For example, if your shell is bash, execute export LANG=de to set German as the language used. Is there any keyboard switcher for international keyboards for &kde;? Yes, you can configure it using the &kde; Control Centre Regional & Accessibility Keyboard Layout configuration page. How do I replace the standard text login screen with the &kde; login screen? Your distribution/&UNIX; flavour may have its own setup tools to change this (⪚ YaST on &SuSE; &Linux;). This will be the safest way to enable the &kde; login screen. However, if for some reason you do not wish to use these tools, the following instructions may be useful. First, you need to change to the xdm runlevel (runlevel 5 on &RedHat; and &SuSE; systems) by editing your /etc/inittab file. In the file, you should have a line saying id:3:initdefault:. Change it to id:5:initdefault:. Now, at the end of the file, comment out the following line: x:5:respawn:/usr/bin/X11/xdm -nodaemon and replace it with x:5:respawn:/opt/kde/bin/kdm -nodaemon. The location of &kdm; may differ on your system. For changes to take effect immediately, type init 5 (for &RedHat; systems) at the shell prompt. It is risky to initiate a graphical login without checking beforehand whether it works. If it fails to work, you would be in for a hard time getting back.... For FreeBSD, you should edit the file /etc/ttys and change one of the lines that look like ttyv8 "/usr/X11R6/bin/xdm -nodaemon" xterm off secure to instead say ttyv8 "/usr/local/bin/kdm -nodaemon" xterm off secure. I would like to click the &LMB; anywhere on the desktop and have the K menu displayed. Open the &kde; Control Centre and choose Desktop Behaviour. You can now choose the behaviour of mouse clicks on the desktop. To have the K menu open from a single &LMB; click, change the entry labelled Left button to say Application Menu. Where do I find information regarding &kde; themes? Go to http://kde.themes.org/ or http://www.kde-look.org. How do I change &MIME; Types? If you are using &konqueror;, do this instead: first, open a &konqueror; window and choose SettingsConfigure Konqueror, then File Associations. Find the type you want to change (⪚ text/english or image/gif), and set the application preference order to whatever you want. &kde; (&kdm;) does not read my .bash_profile! The login managersxdm and &kdm; do not run a login shell, so .profile, .bash_profile, &etc; are not sourced. When the user logs in, xdm runs Xstartup as root and then Xsession as user. So the normal practice is to add statements in Xsession to source the user profile. Please edit your Xsession and .xsession files. How do I use &TrueType; fonts in &kde;? You need to install &TrueType; font support into your &X-Window; configuration. Please take a look at x.themes.org for the fonts, and xfsft: &TrueType; Font Support For X11 or X-&TrueType; Server Project Home Page for the font servers. If you have a bunch of &TrueType; fonts from &Microsoft; &Windows;, edit the XF86Config file to get the fonts from the font folder. Then just tell &kde; to use these new fonts with the font administrator utility. Is it possible to enter, show and work with the Euro Symbol in &kde;? Yes and no. For details, look here: http://www.koffice.org/kword/euro.php. How do I run a program at &kde; startup? There are many ways to do that. If what you want to do is to run some scripts that would set some environment variables (for example, to start gpg-agent, ssh-agent and others), you can put these scripts into $KDEHOME/env/ and make sure their names end in .sh. $KDEHOME is usually a folder named .kde (note the period at the beginning) in your home folder. If you want scripts to be executed for all &kde; users, you can put them under $KDEDIR/env/, where $KDEDIR is the prefix &kde; was installed to (you can find this out using the command kde-config --prefix). If you wish to start a program after &kde; has started, you may want to use the Autostart folder. To add entries to the Autostart folder: Open &konqueror;. Select GoAutostart from the menubar. Right-click in the window view area and select Create NewFileLink to Application Click on the Application tab in the window that appears and enter the name of the command to run in the Command text box.