Kicker (KDE)

Kicker is the main panel used in K Desktop Environment 3 and earlier. Together with KDesktop it forms the graphical shell. It can be customized by the user. By default, it has the K Menu, a Desktop Access button, a Home button, a Konqueror button, a Kontact button, and a Help button. It also has the Desktop Preview & Pager, the Taskbar, the System Tray, and the Clock.

It was a core part of the KDE desktop, and as such packaged as part of the kdebase module. Kicker was also ported from Qt3 to Qt4.

In KDE Software Compilation 4 Kicker, KDesktop, and SuperKaramba were replaced by KDE Plasma 4. The graphical shells KDE Plasma 4 and KDE Plasma 5 being widget engines of their own, SuperKaramba is no longer necessary and e.g. "Kicker" was re-implemented as such a desktop widget.

Applets

Kicker can embed various applets into itself. The included applets as of KDE 3.5 are:

KDE

KDE (/ˌkeɪdiːˈiː/) is an international free software community producing free and libre software like Plasma Desktop, KDE Frameworks and many cross-platform applications designed to run on modern Unix-like and Microsoft Windows systems. The Plasma Desktop is a desktop environment provided as the default work environment on many Linux distributions, such as openSUSE, Mageia, Kubuntu, Manjaro Linux and also the default desktop environment on PC-BSD, a BSD operating system.

The goal of the community is to develop free software solutions and applications for the daily needs of an end-user, as well as providing tools and documentation for developers to write such software. In this regard, the resources provided by KDE make it a central development hub and home for many popular applications and projects like Calligra Suite, Krita, digiKam, and many others.

History

Origins

K Desktop Environment (KDE) was founded in 1996 by Matthias Ettrich, who was then a student at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen. At the time, he was troubled by certain aspects of the Unix desktop. Among his concerns was that none of the applications looked, felt, or worked alike. He proposed the creation of not merely a set of applications but a desktop environment in which users could expect things to look, feel, and work consistently. He also wanted to make this desktop easy to use; one of his complaints about desktop applications of the time was that it is too complicated for end user. His initial Usenet post spurred a lot of interest, and the KDE project was born.

KDE (disambiguation)

KDE may refer to:

K Desktop Environment 2

K Desktop Environment 2 was the second series of releases of the K Desktop Environment. There were three major releases in this series.

Major updates

K Desktop Environment 2 introduced significant technological improvements compared to its predecessor.

DCOP (Desktop COmmunication Protocol), a client-to-client communications protocol intermediated by a server over the standard X11 ICE library.

KIO, an application I/O library. It is network transparent and can access HTTP, FTP, POP, IMAP, NFS, SMB, LDAP and local files. Moreover, its design permits developers to "drop in" additional protocols, such as WebDAV, which will then automatically be available to all KDE applications. KIO can also locate handlers for specified MIME types; these handlers can then be embedded within the requesting application using the KParts technology.

KParts, a component object model, allows an application to embed another within itself. The technology handles all aspects of the embedding, such as positioning toolbars and inserting the proper menus when the embedded component is activated or deactivated. KParts can also interface with the KIO trader to locate available handlers for specific MIME types or services/protocols.