Using Templates to access Applications and Devices

In KDE it's easy to put icons on the panel or the desktop to access your applications. It's just as easy to add icons to access other items of interest. KDE has templates for shortcuts to:

Applications
Printers
Mountable Devices (e.g. floppy drives)
Internet resources (e.g. WWW documents, FTP folders)
Documents for some of KDE's KOffice applications.

You can add any of these items to the desktop by right mouse button clicking where you want the icon, and choosing Create New and selecting the item you want to link to.

Nearly every item in the K menu, on the desktop, and on the panel refers to a .desktop file on disk. The .desktop file specifies what icon to display, as well as specific information about what the icon represents (an application, device, or URL). You can drag any .desktop file to the panel to create a quick-launch button.

Mounting devices

UNIX® provides access to storage devices other than the primary hard disk through a process called mounting. KDE uses .desktop files to allow you to easily mount, unmount, and access files on secondary storage devices such as floppy drives and CD-ROM drive drives.

As an example, here are the steps needed to create an icon to access files on a floppy disk:

Note

Many systems require you to be logged in as root to mount and unmount devices.

Right click on the desktop and choose Create New->Device->Floppy Device....
On the General tab of the resulting dialog, change the name to whatever you like, in the text box at the top.
On the Device tab, enter /dev/fd0 (or the path to the floppy device as it is named on your system) as the Device.
You can add a Mount Point here too. This should be an existing folder, but empty. Common mount points are /mnt/floppy or /floppy, but you can just as easily have floppy disks mounted on ~/mydisk if you want.
Click the Unmounted Icon and select the picture of a floppy disk without the green light.
Once you're happy with your choices, choose OK and you are finished!

Now, place a properly formatted floppy in the drive and click the Floppy icon to have KDE mount the floppy drive and display the files on the disk. Before removing the disk from the drive, right mouse button click the Floppy icon and choose Unmount from the menu.