If you are accustomed to usual Unix file managers, forget everything you learned about them. File managers in the UNIX area are little programs which are started on demand, providing an overview over the file system and allowing to copy, move and rename files, creating directories etc. Sometimes they are able to run applications or start an application to open some document. These were the old UNIX days. Today the user expects more. The computer industry is moving towards a network computer interface where it does not matter, where on the world a file is located. The file manager should act the same on all resources no matter where they are located. We will come back to this interesting topic in the next section.
A very important improvement of today's desktops is the folder metaphor. Every directory on your hard disk is represented as a folder to you. A folder is displayed in a window, showing you an icon for every file in the folder. Well, if you ever used Mac, Win95 or OS/2 you will know what I mean. If you started KDE for your first time you will notice that there is a window with lots of icons in it. This is the folder representing your home directory (this is your current directory after logging into your computer). Since KDE supports session management, it saves the position and several other attributes of every open application at logout time. This means that you see the same windows that were opened while you logged out when you log back in.
Let's return to the folder window. It contains a set of icons and it is a good idea to click with the right mouse button on such an icon. You will see a popup menu that allows you to copy, move and delete the file, move it to the trash, open its properties dialogs or start some application to open the document and much more. KDE has a set of so called MIME-types. (MIME is an acronym for "Multimedia Internet Mail Extension", but if you did not know that by know you probably do not need to know it at all.) They tell KDE which icon it should use for which kind of file. Please notice that there is no need to edit long configuration files to get all these pretty icons. Every KDE application which needs new MIME types and other stuff should come with preconfigured config files and icons (since this is a beta, and not a final version, this might not be the case everywhere; please send a bug report if you notice any omissions). What I wanted to express: Everything should work out of the box. If you have installed e.g. the KDE postscript viewer, then KDE knows which icon to use for postscript files and which application can handle them. As a result, you can just press the left mouse button over an icon, and KDE tries to find an appropriate application. If that is not the case, KDE will ask you for one. It may happen that you have installed several apps for the same kind of data. In this case, they are all listed in the popup menu discussed above. In another part of KDE documentation, you will learn how to set a default application if several apps installed for images for example.
Now you know that KDE can deal with files and directories, copy, move and delete them and many other nifty things. KDE can open documents for you. On a properly installed KDE, you don't need to know which app is needed to do so.
KDE supports drag and drop in many places. We will talk more about this later. Right now you should notice that every icon in KDE's folder windows can be dragged out of the folder window and be deposited on the desktop.
As mentioned in the previous chapter, networks are becoming more and more important. In the near past, you needed a couple of applications to deal with files which are distributed all over the world. KDE supports a technology that is called "Network Transparent Access" (NTA) which means that the user does not have to worry about the location of some file. KDE will do the same no matter whether the file is on the other side of the earth or on your local hard disk.
The KDE folder window can not only show you the content of usual directories. The directory content on an ftp server is displayed in such a window as well. Perhaps you are used to the WinZip(tm) utility on MS-Windows(tm), then you will be happy to hear that KDE can look into tar archives, too. The content of such an archive is displayed in a folder window as well. You won't notice a difference between them (well, since the internet is slow, you will notice that ftp directories will show up much slower than local ones, but that is not KDE's fault :-)
Clicking for example on an image on some ftp server will start your favourite image viewer. KDE retrieves the file from the web for you and starts your image viewer afterwards. For example "oldies" like XV become internet aware this way! Until there is not yet a KDE application for your purposes (though there are already KDE applications for many tasks, and many more a currently written), you can let old applications make use of NTA simply by providing some configuration. We'll tell you how to do this later on the documentation.
We already talked about icons a lot. Right now we had a look at them if they appeared in folder windows. But icons may as well appear on the background of the desktop, too. This feature is well known from most modern desktops like OS/2(tm) and Macintosh(tm). I think you are not surprised if I tell you that icons on the background of your desktop behave like the ones in the folder. Clicking on them forces the same actions to happen, the context sensitive popup menu is the same and so on. There is only a little difference: You can position them at will. Icons in a folder window are sorted by name, you can not save their positions which is why KDE does not allow you user specific placement of icons in folder windows yet.
You can do many nice things with drag'n'drop. For example, let's
say you have an icon representing an application (this icon may be in
the folder window, on the panel or on the background of your
desktop). When you drop another icon which represents a file on it,
the application starts up and opens the files you dropped on
it. Similarly, you can drop icons over a folder icon. This will copy,
move or link (KDE will ask you what you want) these files in the
folder. Please remember that files can be represented by any URL, not
just local filenames. /home/weis/docu.txt is as valid as
http://www.kde.org.
Many people don't know that they are also allowed to drag icons which represent applications, printers etc. on the panel. This results in a new button on the panel. This button will of course reappear after logging out and logging in again. In addition to application and printers, the KDE link files (sometimes referred to as kdelnk files or "desktop entries") can represent almost everything from WWW sites, over applications to printers; you have many many possibilities to explore. If you link an URL on your desktop, KDE creates such a kdelnk file for you on the fly. The extension "kdelnk" is hidden, since it does not look very nice. Therefore, kdelnk files look like usual icons. Prominent kdelnk files are for example the floppy and cdrom icon that we will discuss now.
"To mount a device" means that you e.g. add the content of your cdrom to your directory tree. Unlike MS-Windows, UNIX has one big directory tree that contains every device. If you click on such a device icon, KDE will try to mount the device and opens the directory this device is mounted on. For example after mounting the cdrom on my system the directory "/cd" shows up. With a right click on a device button you get the option to unmount the device again. Unless you unmount it, you are not allowed to remove the disk or cdrom. To get this automatic mount feature to work, your /etc/fstab must allow users to mount/unmount this device. Later chapters will show you what has to be done; you could also consult the documentation of your OS vendor.