SRC="logotp3.gif" BORDER="0" ALT="The K Desktop Environment">

Next Previous Table of Contents

2. KdiskFree

KDiskFree provides you a graphical overview on your block devices (disks, partitions, floppy-drive...) and their usage. It reads the file /etc/fstab to get information about possibly mounted devices and then periodically calls the df-command to look at actually mounted devices. Unmounted devices are shown in lightgray.

You may invoke KDiskFree ("kcmdf") from your KControlCenter under Information/Block Devices or directly by typing "kdf". "kdf" is more light-weighted in the screen-size used, so if you want to always have a KDiskFree open (as I do) try "kdf" instead of "kcmdf".

KDiskFree was written 1998 by Michael Kropfberger and underlies the terms of GPL.

2.1 Overview

There are following columns which are shown in KDiskfree:

Icon

shows icon for the actual device/mountpoint combination

Device

shows the filename of the listed device

Type

shows the filesystem-type of the listed device (e.g. ext2, msdos, vfat, minix...)

Size

shows the maximum size of the device

MountPoint

shows you, where the device is mounted to

Free

shows you, how many Bytes (rounded to Gigabytes, Megabytes, Kilobytes for convenience) are really available

Full %

indicates the percentage of fullness; if this exceeds 95%, the whole device entry is printed out in red and a warning message pops up on the active desktop.

UsageBar

shows you the space-usage in a graphical way (blue = full, white= available)

2.2 Features

There are also many usable features included:

2.3 General Settings

If you click on the Settings-Button you enroll a more-featured settings-window. Primarily you may want to change the update-frequency of KDiskFree. Just use the scrollBar to select the appropriate frequency. If you want to DISABLE the auto-update-feature, you only have to select 0 as your update-frequency. To force an update, just press the Apply-Button.

There you can enable/disable the shown columns of your device-Overview. If you don't want to see the Filesystem-Type (which maybe is not of that interest to you, because it doesn't change every five seconds) you may just click on the Type-Header in your settings-window, so the checked-icon under Type changes to a crossed-out-icon. To enable it, just press the Type-Header again and the crossed-out-icon becomes a checked-icon. For convenience, you may also double-, mid- or right-click on the icons to get the same effect.

There is also a LineEdit to enter the preferred FileManager used when you click on the mountpoint of a device. The %m will be substituted with the actual mountpoint.

To reset all to the default values, just click on the Defaults-Button

2.4 (U)Mount Commands

In this Tab you can edit mount commands for every device/mountpoint pair. This is eg. useful for zip-drives which need a root-called insmod ppa before mounting is possible. You could write a little script like this to do that:


#!/bin/bash
kdesu -c insmod ppa
mount /zip

and store it in /usr/local/bin/mount_zip. Now you can use this script when you click on the device /zip. Possible parameters are:

%d
Device Name
%mMount Point
%tFilesystem Type
%oMount Options
If no mount command is given, a default "mount %d" is used instead. If you are root the default command is "mount -t%t %d %m -o %o".

2.5 Icons

If the user doesn't set a specific Icon in (U)Mount Commands settings dialog, a special magic is tried. So a device /dev/fd0 or mountpoint /floppy gets a floppy icon assigned. Also NFS mounts are recognized and a special icon is shown. Every device/mountpoint can be mounted (green button in the buttom right) and if it is only (u)mountable by root, the icon gets a red frame around it. If the user gives his own icon, there are a few important things to keep in mind: all filenames for icons have to look like this: myicon_mount.xpm and myicon_unmount.xpm because only myicon is stored and the rest is appended. The files should be in the mini-icon directory (this is $KDEDIR/share/icons/mini or $HOME/.kde/share/icons/mini).

2.6 Comments ...

Comments to Michael Kropfberger michael.kropfberger@gmx.net.
Last changed: 17. March 1999

Next Previous Table of Contents