Plasma/Plasmoids

Widgets and Plasmoids

Here are some of our favourites:

System Widgets

Device Notifier

The Device Notifier is used for handling pluggable devices such as USB pendrives (also called flash drives or thumb drives), digital cameras, external USB hard drives etc. It also comes into play when a medium such as a CD or DVD is loaded into an optical drive.

When the you plug in an external device, or load a new medium into a drive, KDE pops up the Notifier window (you can also open it explicitly by clicking on its Panel icon.) It stays open while the cursor is over it, otherwise it hides itself after a few seconds.

The Notifier window shows a list of all the devices it currently knows about. Moving the mouse cursor over a device will highlight how many possible actions are associated with that device. If the device is mounted, there will also be a small icon to the right of it. Clicking on this causes the device to be unmounted and/or the medium to be ejected. Note that unmounting/ejecting might fail if the device still has open files on it, e.g. if a large file copy hasn't finished. In most cases you can just wait a while and try again.

Clicking anywhere in the shaded box around the device name (but not on the eject/unmount icon if present) pops up a dialogue box with a list of possible actions that make sense for that device. Simply select one and click on OK or hit the Enter key. Double-clicking also works. The Cancel button dismisses the pop-up without taking any no action.

Weather Widgets

LCD Weather Plasmoid

The LCD weather plasmoid gets its information from one of three sources, the BBC weather from the UK Met. Office, NOAA's National Weather Service, or Environment Canada. If it can locate a weather station near you it will give you a range of details about the current weather.

It can also be installed to the Task-bar, in which case you get an icon-size display which simply shows the current outside temperature.