K Desktop Environment
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# Chapter 6. All About Your Desktop

| Grandma, what big eyes you have!
| Little Red Riding Hood

| The better to see you!
| The Wolf

The more you see, the more efficiently you can use your desktop. KDE gives you the opportunity to make the desktop look and work the you way prefer, enabling you to work faster and more productively. It even gives you the opportunity to be warned if a wolf is trying to eat you, or (if you happen to be a granny) alert you when Little Red Riding Hood is on her way to bring you the goodies. Now that's service.

# 6.1. The Autostart Folder

Before I discovered the Autostart folder, my daily startup routine with KDE consisted of the following: Start KDE, start KEdit, start Konsole, start Netscape, and start kscd. This took time I could have spent better. Native KDE programs left open at the end of a session will save their state and reappear when you login again, but there are some programs (like Netscape) that will not. You can use the `Autostart` folder for these programs.

To launch programs when KDE is started, do the following:

1. Open the `Autostart` folder. You will probably find it in the top left corner of your desktop.

2. Open a Konqueror window and browse to the program you want to add. If you don't know how to do this, it was covered in Section 5.1.1

3. Drag and drop the desired program from the Konqueror window onto the `Autostart` folder. When asked, choose Link to create a symbolic link rather than a full copy, as this saves a great deal of disk space.

4. Repeat the above steps for every program you want started when KDE is launched. Remember, you don't need to add native KDE applications, just leave them open when you log out, and they will open up again as if nothing had happened, the next time you log in to KDE.

5. Restart KDE if you want to see the autostart function in action.

Your programs should now launch automatically when KDE restarted. If you want to add something special (e.g., you want to see a certain web site when your system goes up), read Using templates. The procedures described there works for any folder, so you can also apply them to the `Autostart` folder, as well.

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