KDE

So, I've started plugging my headphone into my monitor's headphone jack rather than the analog audio ports in my CPU and there's been a drastic reduction in the volume levels. The volume is often insufficient even when everything in my volume settings is maxed out. Here are a couple of things to try out in KDE/Kubuntu/Linux that might help alleviate the situation.

So I upgraded my Linux box to the latest Kubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf!) and it's been an interesting few days ironing out niggles. One of them has been the missing partition manager icon which (IIRC) was present in 14.04 and where I could control which partitions were automounted at login. From the looks of it, there is no easy solution for this like installing a package or some weird Plasma widget. The only solution I was provided on IRC was the following roundabout-borderline-hack:

So if you've just installed or upgraded to the new version of Kubuntu (Wily Werewolf), you will notice that Skype runs fine but does not appear in the system tray as an icon. The workaround to fix this is to install the sni-qt package, but specifically the 32-bit version of the package (as Skype is a 32-bit app). To do this, open a terminal and type:

This will also install a dependency. Once this is installed, quit Skype and restart it to find the familiar green check in your system tray.

I was looking for a way to add a custom context (right-click) menu to KDE's Dolphin (in Kubuntu 14.10, Utopic) that (much like in Windows) would allow me to enqueue an entire folder/directory in Videolan. Many of the examples that I looked at were rather sketchy or incomplete. Here's a simple working example that might be of help to someone else out there. You can modify it appropriately to get it working for other applications as well.

For the last few weeks, I've noticed weird red dots/lines or similar marks on my Kubuntu screen. I'd attributed them to a graphics issue that I'd recently sorted out, particularly because I was mainly noticing these marks when resuming the system from sleep mode. Turns out I was wrong. Very wrong.

This has happened to me on a number of occasions where I've found that my system audio only plays when I switch to a different tty. I don't know exactly how to duplicate the issue . But essentially, if I switch from my Kubuntu 14.10 KDE desktop to a different tty (using something like CtrlAltF5) and then switch back to the KDE tty, I find that I can hear no audio. However, if I switch again to the command-line tty, I can hear that audio that ought to have been playing in KDE. Rather weird, huh?

I can sometimes be rather picky (some would say 'anal') when I write, for example, an e-mail. I get annoyed if I have to resort to typing three periods for an ellipsis rather than achieving it with just the one character. Doing something with one character instead of three is also a skill that has carved itself a niche in this age of Twitter. So how would one go about it?

The title sounds like the name of a fantasy novel ... but I'm of course talking (or, as you, stranger of the Internet, will find out, ranting) about the KDE audio player. Amarok is the default audio player for KDE which makes it the default audio player of Kubuntu, my Linux distro of choice. Now, some history before I begin spitting all over you. I usually use Windows as my primary desktop.

In Kubuntu/Ubuntu (and presumably Debian and other derivatives), the CTRL + ALT + F4 (or any other function key) keyboard shortcut switches from the desktop to a virtual terminal while CTRL + ALT + F7 brings you back to the desktop. However, I want to disable this as it's messing up my HTPC thanks to its dodgy remote control. While I could find a solution for Gnome/Ubuntu readily enough, KDE/Kubuntu was not immediately apparent.

After my upgrade to Kubuntu 12.04/Precise Pangolin, I found that while KTorrent worked, it was buggy as right-clicking on torrents did nothing. I blamed this on a configurational mishap during the upgrade and lived with it as I could do perform most operations using the main menu or the toolbar buttons. However, with most sites moving away from .torrent files and toward magnet links, I found that KTorrent wasn't playing nice with the magnet URIs.