[How To] Add a “Places” Menu in KDE

KDE. Some think of it as the desktop environment that doesn’t get the attention it deserves.

What I like most about KDE is that there is Plasmoid (a form of widget for KDE) for almost everything – Facebook, clocks, weather, tweeting, start menus, Dash, calculator, system monitors etc… you name it.

One plasmoid I find really useful is the “Places” menu. Now I know what you’re thinking, and yes “places” can be accessed from Kickoff (or Lancelot) or even from Dolphin itself, but I’ve always prefered having a separate plasmoid pinned in my panel “a la Gnome 2″.

Look and feel

The plasmoid itself is pretty staightforward to use and has a nifty little feature to show the space usage of a hard disk when hovered with the mouse:

KDE Places Plasmoid

Installation

If you are using Ubuntu yor any of it’s derivates ou can just add my OMG! Ubuntu! PPA and install the package “usu-places”:

  • sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kokoto-java/omgubuntu-stuff && sudo apt-get update
  • sudo apt-get install usu-places

You can also install it using KDE’s built-in Plasmoid search tool. Just search for usu-places:
 It’s also available to download from here as standalone .plasmoid file:

Download

If you are interested in the source code you can grab it by clicking here.

Once installed you can add it your preferred panel by right-clicking on the desktop, selecting “Add Widgets” and searching for “usu”.

Related posts:

  1. Veromix – soundmenu tray plasmoid for KDE
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  • http://mark-y-a.myopenid.com/ Marky

    OT:  There is that girl wallpaper again. Is that the new green bird? =P  For the past few days I keep on seeing that anime wallpaper on this site.

    • http://twitter.com/PaterSigmund Benjamin Schwilling

       It is the Dark Magician Girl of the trading card game Yu-Gi-Oh…. a pretty useless card…. but hey the girl appears in the series. Yata Garasu FTW!

      • Georgi Karavasilev

        Hey, what’s wrong with the card :D
        P.S. I’ve attached the wallpaper :P

        • http://twitter.com/PaterSigmund Benjamin Schwilling

          Beside the design? EVERYTHING! Dark Grey is more usefull or the Toon Dragoon….. ohhhh… i miss this game

          • Georgi Karavasilev

            Not entirely true – it gets three hundred attack points for every Dark magician and Magician of black chaos in the graveyard … and due to the fact it’s a spellcaster it gets bonus from YAMI … and I tend to play with magician decks, so DMG is a must :D

          • http://twitter.com/PaterSigmund Benjamin Schwilling

            Hmmm…. for a fun game this set up might be ok. But i wouldn’t say that this will stand a tournament… at least if i would join ^^
            But hey, it’s all about the karma.

          • Georgi Karavasilev

            If you think having 3 DMG is crazy, what will you say if I told you I have 3 “Magicians of Black Chaos” and 3 “Dark magic rituals” :D (Which is actually true)

  • http://twitter.com/m404c 404

    Украинец на OMG? Неожиданно. Я приятно поражён многонациональностью вашей команды.

    • Anonymous

      I will bet he’s Bulgarian – both the name and USU is Ubuntu based Bulgarian Distro, aimed at students :)
      Still unexpected

    • Georgi Karavasilev

      @twitter-212196267:disqus What @StoyanDeckoff:disqus said is absolutely correct :)

    • Stefan Rosca

      Ты ещё про молдован не знаешь :D

      • Oleksandr Pylkevych

        Просто многие читают, а не комментируют

    • Oleksandr Pylkevych

      They are Bulgarian :D But you are right in some case, I’m Ukrainian. I like to read but to leave some comments. I write it especially for you :)

  • http://www.facebook.com/zeroangel David Bobb

    Useful, but buggy with the Caledonia Plasma Theme. Black text on a black background is, well, not so readable.

  • http://profiles.google.com/lilianftp Moraru Lilian

    KDE is my favorite DE. It was crashing before but now it’s stable and it’s only a pleasure to use it, for me…

    Edit: P.S: It needs proof reading. A lot of mistakes(the article).

    • Adam Martinez

      I agree. KDE is very stable now but the big downside is the look of the fonts; they look absolutely terrible and ruin the experience for me.

      • Georgi Karavasilev

        Hmm, I experience no issues with KDE’s font rendering :P
        However I experienced such in the past and deleting ~/.fonts.conf fixed them :)

        • Jos Geluk

          I agree. I have used KDE for a long time. Bad font rendering can make anything look ugly. Deleting fonts.conf has helped me more than once.

      • Anonymous

        I personaly don’t like the look of application like the one above – it looks like buttons and controlls are dropped in random places.

        • Anonymous

          I don’t know what your talking about, I think its because your probably on Unity or Gnome or xfce were you are using Gnome and GTK apps, Gnome’s UI conventions and Hig are different then that of KDE so KDE’s button may seem like they have been put in strange places.

      • Fatriff

        Well fix them then!! It’s simple, goto appearance then fonts and put these settings in.

        Use anti-aliasing: Enabled, Then click Configure next to it and check the box for use sub-pixel rendering and set that to RGB and then the hinting to Slight.

        The daily mail website is a good site to test the fonts on.

        On my machine BGR looks the best in Firefox only, for some reason it doesn’t work on other things like dolphin so i’ve stuck with RGB.

      • Fatriff

         Another thing, if you installed KDE ontop of Ubuntu then the fonts will look like total crap. It must be a KDE distro like Kubuntu.

    • http://azadrah.net Sasan

      Hipster KDE: crashing before it was cool

  • Satchit Bhogle

    The first line should read “KDE. Some think of it as the desktop environment that doesn’t *GET* the attention it deserves.”

    • GonzO Rodrigue

      He accidentally a word. :-)

      • Georgi Karavasilev

        That’s not me, it was Joey who missed the word (my original introduction was so crappy he had to edit it and made a typo … fixed now)

  • http://profiles.google.com/everlasting.puneet puneet singh

    We kept on fighting about who is more beautiful gnome-shell or Unity, And now I see this KDE and feels that it is awesome.

  • http://profiles.google.com/lunarcloud Samuel Sarette

    Nice. One of these days I intend on helping create a more complete set of plasma widgets.

    QtQuick and Plasmate are wonderful.

  • Anonymous

    Been checking opendesktop.org daily for KDE stuff, but this never appeared. I am happy to see KDE getting some attention!
     (Also nice BMG)

  • http://nowardev.wordpress.com/ nowardev

    well youdon’t need of that widget .. there was shelf…. and you can get this too with kde :

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYzEty1TYAE

  • Даниел Цветков

    Айдеее, малко български в OMG-то!!

    • Georgi Karavasilev

      Ми то аз съм единствен, но пак е нещо :D

      • Anonymous

        This is the first post from you I read. Good luck.
        PS Switched form KDE to Unity 2D since 11.10, it has less bugs for me with this release, but sometimes I kind of miss the widgets and activities :)

        • Georgi Karavasilev

          This is my ninth post here :P
          P.S. Funny, I found Kubuntu 11.10 to be flawless for me … call me lucky :D

          • http://nosheep.org.ua Алексей Раю

            For me, Kubuntu’s Plasma crashes periodically. I also disabled indexing – and it periodically floods the screen with error messages telling me it’s not working (it forgot it’s me who disabled it). So, it’s not perfect for me. Also sometimes loses sound card for no evident reason.

          • Georgi Karavasilev

            And does your video happens to be ATi? 

          • http://nosheep.org.ua Алексей Раю

            Yes, it’s ATI.

          • Georgi Karavasilev

            Oh, ATi is problematic … Try disabling some of the bling-bling, could help (at “Sync with VBlank” must be disabled)

          • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_4LXTMAC7KVMD7JBKWBCCBU4HSU inner_turbulence

            You should disable Semantic Desktop notifications in System Settings->System And Application Notifications->Manage Notifications.

            If it loses your sound card, it is most probably because of pulse audio. Remove pulse-audio. Alsa is much better.

            For plasma crashes, try removing certain widgets one by one and try to find the problematic one. If you can’t find any it is most probably a problem with the plasma-desktop code. KDE 4.8 is going to be released in two weeks. That should help a lot. As there has been lots of bug fixes.

          • http://nosheep.org.ua Алексей Раю

            Thanks for your help on this! It has helped me with the most distracting issues!

      • http://nosheep.org.ua Алексей Раю

        Вие не сте сами. Аз също разбирам малко.

    • Todor Tanev

      Специално отворих коментарите, сигурен, че ще има поне един такъв пост :) Greetings everyone! :)

  • Дилян Траянов

    Аз пък минах на Минт хмм.. до вчера бях  с KDE, но много ми натоварна Процесора (Вградено видео..) и така…

  • http://twitter.com/matt_j_bell123 Matt Bell

    Is it stupid to be running KDE inside my Ubuntu (GNOME) installation? I’ve heard there can be issues…

    • Anonymous

      If you install KDE on gnome’s ubuntu you get a lot of extra KDE applications installed with gnome applications. So you end up with 2 text editors (one from gnome on from KDE), 2 music players, 2 file managers… ect

      • http://twitter.com/matt_j_bell123 Matt Bell

        Yes, I’ve seen that now.. :S At least KDE doesn’t take up much space. It’s all good.

    • http://www.swook.net/ Seon-Wook Park

      There is no ‘installing inside GNOME’.
      It’s simply adding an extra desktop environment choice.

      Enjoy the freedom of choice! :)

      • http://twitter.com/matt_j_bell123 Matt Bell

        Huzzah!

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_TLL2FJYJSJH6VKCI6KLSRZ3Y2E TurtleKing

    Is OMGUbuntu doing more KDE news? I posted a useful tutorial on Ubuntu Forums, but it quickly disappeared due to new threads. Would be great if it got posted here:
    http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1806570

    • Georgi Karavasilev

      TBH, OMG! is doing all kinds of news :P

  • Manuel Thallinger

    What Theme is this in the Screenshot ? i realy like that glas look =D

    • Georgi Karavasilev

      The default “Air” plasma theme :)

  • Glaasje

    all this talk about plasmoid’s and stuff

    I am getting old…

  • Anonymous

    Holy crap, it’s Dark Magician Girl. I haven’t seen her since 7th grade.

  • http://johannpopper.myopenid.com/ Johann popper

    Kubuntu should never have tossed Quick Access to the Home Folder that allows you to look at your Home folder in the same fashion, which was default in Kubuntu until 11.04 or 11.10. It was great. Good thing its still in the repositories.

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_37EVLRX5KHSP7CQ6DBU2NFKZJI Carlo

    no ! no! kde is terrifying, unity is beautiful !

  • Anonymous

    I’ve always loved KDE 4, even when it was ‘broken’. It was much better than the competition at the time.

  • Igor Rakocevic

    Not a fan of KDE, but i must say it looks nice
    and Nice Background of Dark Magician Girl

  • http://dropsofbloodonmyforehead.blogspot.com H Myers

    It seems to think it’s at the top of the screen, the way it rolls down, leaving the last item obscured by my panel at the bottom of the screen.  No setting to change this.  Otherwise, very nice looking.