Drop By!

This is an addition to my post Convenient SSH on Linux cause I was suprised finding that KDE is run from ssh-agent per default.

# ps aux | grep ssh-agent
userx    6784  0.0  0.0   4480   816 ?        Ss   19:02   0:00 /usr/bin/ssh-agent /usr/bin/gpg-agent --daemon --sh --write-env-file=/home/userx/.gnupg/gpg-agent-info-myhome /usr/bin/startkde

So, first, how can you disable this?

In /etc/X11/Xsession.options :

# cat /etc/X11/Xsession.options
# See Xsession.options(5) for an explanation of the available options.
allow-failsafe
allow-user-resources
allow-user-xsession
use-ssh-agent
use-session-dbus

If you want to use the running ssh-agent you can add your keys on startup by putting this script to .kde/Autostart

#!/bin/sh
# set SSH_ASKPASS if not set elsewhere
# export SSH_ASKPASS=/usr/bin/ssh-askpass
for f in /home/userx/.ssh/mykeys/*_dsa ; do ssh-add $f </dev/null ; done ; 

Also check the related ubuntu bugs

If it happens that you see the error message:”Unknown device: x11″ when you want a print file preview or similar, install the gs-esp-x package. That will fix the problem.

Command line utilities are great for one-pointed tasks or for batch processing, but sometimes you just want to browse around and quickly play with the options. For that purpose I prefer to use GUI-tools.

In ubuntu you can use the svn-workbench as an GUI-Client written in python to subversion repositories. I am using KDE, so installing kdesvn (also see kde-apps.org) gives me a repository access and management functions right in my Konqueror file browser by using addresses like: ksvn+https://rcs.somehost.de/rep1. In this way you can work in repositories without explicit checkout. The only draw back appears in case you want to copy directories. Due to Konquerors way of copying/moving with KIO you will be asked for log messages for each single subdir or file recursively. To avoid being asked for log messages every time start kdesvn, go to Main Menu Settings – Configure Kdesvn – KIO/Commandline – check KIO operations use standard logmessage .

Kdesvn adds extra functions in Konqueror’s context menu : RightClick – Actions – Subversion . Kate and QuantaPlus Integration is also provided by kdesvn.

BTW: Subclipse is a good svn GUI client implementation as well, but requires an Eclipse installation.

I already wrote how to configure the ssh-client for single-sign-on in Convenient SSH on Linux. Today I would like to jump up to the KDE-Layer and see what there can be done to organize networking more effectively. Formerly I used kssh to organize my ssh-accounts (see Installing kssh on ubuntu). Nowadays I prefer a combination of KDE’s Network Folders and Terminal Sessions.

KDE Network Folders can help you to organize your remote access links. It is based on KDE’s support of webdav, ftp, sftp, smb and fish. Fish is quite interesting, it presents files over ssh just as they would be local. There is a special directory where your network folders are stored – type "remote:/" into Konqueror’s address bar. (Other possibility is of course to use simple bookmarks to organize remote connections accessed via “sftp://user@host/” or similiar.) It is just a collection of links which are stored in .kde/share/apps/remoteview by KDE.
The real value of Network Folders lies in the combination with Network Folder Wizard which gives you a configuration interface and quick access list in KDE’s panel.
Read the documentation of knetattach in Konqueror "help:/knetattach/introduction.html" which is the application behind Network Folders administration, also known as Network Folder Wizard also available as an applet by "RightClick Panel" ->  "Add Applet to Panel" -> "Network Folders".

Teminal Sessions is an other applet you can add to your panel. It will list the different konsole sessions. I use sessions to configure ssh shell access and to execute common shell commands like watching remote logs etc. . To add a session open a konsole window, in the menubar click "Settings" -> "Configure Konsole" -> "Session"-tab . In the “General” group type a name for your session, the command to execute (example: ssh xxx.gebewau.de) and your working directory, click save session. You can associate different color schema and icons with different sessions to have better orientation between konsole windows for different purposes. There seems to be no grouping feature for session links.

On my laptop with an ATI graphic card and kubuntu installed I am using either a dual-head configuration in xinerama mode (screen stretched over two monitors) or a simple one monitor setup.

Recently I messed around with the KDE system settings to get a projector working during a presentation. At home again, I wanted to run X in dual-head mode as usual and replaced the xorg.conf with the backuped xorg.conf.xinerama.
Big was my surprise that despite of this kde started in clone mode. So somehow there must be settings outside the xorg.conf file hiding itself in a cosy corner of my file system. Starting up KDE as an other user would show the correct screen.

Where KDE stores this user-related dispaly setting?

~/.kde/share/config/displayconfigrc

If you have got similiar problems – remove it and everything will be fine again!