Author: big_D

Foreword

This installation section of this guide is split into two parts, the first part is SUSE specific on locating and installing the core package for superkaramba. If you don't use SUSE, you might need to search the repositories for your specific distribution, or go to Sourceforge and find a copy for yourself.

What is Superkaramba
Ever seen those desktop widgets that your Mac friends use? Seen the preview shots of Vista which promises sidebar thingies? Used to Windowblinds or whaterver they are called on XP?

Superkaramba is the KDE equivalent - if you are a Gnome user, you can use gDesklets instead of Superkaramba.

Superkaramba provides a hosting applet written in python. It provides a simple scripting language, so you can add your own widgets if you can't find widgets that suit.

Once superkaramba is running, you can add widgets which show you the weather, system performance options, tasks running, your IM contacts, currently playing music track etc.

Those are the widgets running on the right hand side of my screen...

The top one is called Karamtop and lists the top processes that are using your processor. Underneath that is Nanorambe which draws little graphs to show processor usage, memory usage and network traffic flow. The big one in the middle is mine, I took a basic "frosmod" control and reworked it to show what I need. Finally at the bottom is LiquidWeather++ which shows the local weather forecast for your nearest weather station - usually airports from what I can see...

There are hundreds more to choose from, even things like daily Dilbert or Garfield cartoons delivered to your desktop.

Installing under SUSE
Superkaramba doesn't come on the standard media delivered with SUSE 10.0 or 10.1. You will need to add the GURU repository to your list of YaST installation sources (see my HOWTO on adding YaST sources for more information).

Once you have added the Guru repository, you need to start YaST and open the Add/Remove Software applet.

When this has finished loading - which can take some time when you have internet based repositories at it will default to checking the available package versions - you will find yourself in "Search" mode.

Simply type "superkaramba" into search field and press return. It should list the superkaramba package, check it and click on Next. It should then double check any dependencies and then load the package for you.

When it has finished, YaST will exit and you will be able to use superkaramba.

Using Superkaramba
Now that Superkaramba has been installed, you are ready to use it...

Under SUSE, the package from the Guru repo. will install a menu option under the KDE menu KDE->Utilities->Desktop (I think Utilities, my system is installed in German). If you can't find it there, you can open it using the command line, it should be in the system path; from a terminal window type "nohup superkaramba &".

The "nohup" means that the process will run independently of the terminal window that you called it from. The "&" at the end means "don't wait for this command to finish" and returns control directly back to the terminal window so you can execute another command.

Once it is running, it doesn't look very impressive to start with, nothing appears on your desktop! But if you look in the system tray you will see that a little blue blob has appeared, it looks a little like a droplet of water on a flat surface that has bubbled with the surface tension.

Clicking on this blue bubble will open the "Superkaramba Designs" dialog. It should have two entries in the list as a default. "Download New Designs" and "Open local Design" ("Neues runterladen" and "Lokales Design öffnen" in my case).

Download Designs
This automatically looks up the latest and greatest designs on the KDE-Look website. It lists about 30 of the most popular themes. You can download one of these by double clicking on it, single clicking should give you a thumbnail preview of the widget.

Once you have finished downloading the widgets you want, close the download dialog. You will then see the ones you've clicked on added to the list and double clicking on them will execute them.

Warning: LiquidWeather++ will not install this way under SUSE, you will need to manually download the theme and open it locally.

Local Themes
This is a bit of a misnoma unless you are writing your own themes. Essentially, there are hundreds of Karamba themes out there and the Download outlined above only gets the top 30 or so most popular or newest themes...

If you look on the Web you will find plenty of Karambas to choose from . The best place to go is KDE-Look.org.

There you will find literally hundreds of themes to choose from! Most of them are stored as .tar.gz (tar zips), but a few, like LiquidWeather will be stored as .skz's which are pre-built (and un-editable) superkaramba packages.

Once you have found a widget or karamba that you like, download it to your local machine. Then, using Konqueror, you can unpack the tar.gz file to a directory - I unload mine to a MyKarambas directory under my home directory for example.

Once you have extracted the karamba's, you can then point Superkaramba at them using the "open local design" option. This should allow you to navigate to the directory where you unpacked the karamba and it will add it to the list, just like the downloaded version.

Once added, double clicking it will execute it and display it on the screen.

They can be locked in position or you can move them. If they have clickable zones, the zones won't work until the karamba is locked... Moving it is just a matter of clicking on the karamba and dragging it.

To change the locked status, right click on the karamba and lock/unlock it. Some karambas also allow for limited configuration and you can access their customisation dialog through the right click as well.

Note: Not all karambas are well written, and not all of them are 100% stable! If they crash Superkaramba, you will need to manually set-up the karambas you want again.

But at restart/logon, superkaramba should automatically run and remember which karamba's you had open when you logged off...