Onscreen Fundamentals
has two panels. The left panel displays a tree of the installed and available packages, the right panel displays information on the packages.

Drag and Drop
makes use of the Drag and Drop protocol. This means that you can drag and drop packages onto to open them. Dropping a file onto the Find File dialog will find the package that contains the file.

The Package Tree Panel
When is started normally (that is it has not been invoked via drag and drop and has not been given any parameters) it displays two panels with the package tree on the left, this tree shows installed packages and optionally new and updated packages as well.
The tabs on the panel select whether to display installed packages, updated packages, available packages or all packages
The package tree shows the package name, package size, the version and (in the case of an available package which would update an installed package) the version of the already installed package.
Selecting a package from the tree displays information about it in the right panel and allows:
Displaying the status information on the package
Seeing which files are included in an installed package, selecting a file from the list will open it using the file manager
Verifying files in a package, files that exist are marked with a tick, files that don't with a cross.
Uninstalling an installed package
Installing an available package
A single package is selected by clicking on the name. Clicking on the dot in the Mark column marks the package with a tick, a second click unmarks it, while left click can be used to select a range of packages.

Integrating available packages in the tree
Access to available is setup via the Location menu entries for each package type under the Settings menu.
For RPM packages can read a directory containing packages and add these to the package tree as either new or updated packages. It is possible to examine or install these packages from the package tree. By default the information about the packages is extracted from the standard format of the file names and so it is necessary to use the Examine button to see the full description, it is possible though to set an option so that for local directories each package file is read, this is slower but gives a full description.
For Debian packages that are handled using dpkg there are three ways of accessing available packages, these can be selected in three different types of location setting panels.
Specify the location of the Debian package tree and select the distribution and architecture, will look in the standard places for the Package files describing the available packages, these packages are then added to the package tree and can be examined or installed
Specify the location of the Debian distribution along with the Packages files for the parts of the distribution that are of interest. If the dselect program is being used then the file /var/lib/dpkg/available can be used as a Packages file that describes the distribution that dselect uses.
Packages directories can be handled in the same way as with RPM packages.
For Debian packages that are handled using APT the location of uninstalled package repositories is set in the /etc/apt/sources.list file, the Location menu can still be used for directories containing Debian packages. These packages are fetched and cached by apt itself, not by
For Slackware packages there is very little information stored on installed packages, but it is possible to use a PACKAGE.TXT file as a source of information about the installed packages. The PACKAGES.TXT file is the equivalent of a Debian Packages file and Slackware distributions are structured with a directory tree containing the .tgz packages and a PACKAGES.TXT file that describes the packages.
As with Debian distributions the packages in a Slackware distribution can be integrated into the package tree. Unfortunately the Slackware packages don't carry version information so it is not possible to tell with available packages are newer than installed ones.
For BSD packages will understand a packages distribution directory that contains an INDEX file (which describes all the packages) and also contains an All directory (with all the package files in it).
For remote directories and package files ( those fetched via ) will do caching, the packages are cached in ~/.kpackage and the directories in ~/.kpackage/dir
For the handling of remote () directories to work, it may be necessary to not have the FTP Proxy set in the Browser Settings.

Package Information Panel
The right panel has tabs for displaying two different types of information about selected packages
The Properties tab which displays information on the selected package. In the dependency information there are hyper-links to the packages listed, installed packages are in standard font, uninstalled packages are in italic.
The File List tab shows the files in the package and for installed packages shows the state of the files.

Root Access
requires root access for installing/uninstalling packages, this can be can be done by running as root, say by using .
Alternatively, if is running as a normal user it will try to run the install/uninstall programs a root by logging in to a psuedo terminal, it will use either su or ssh to do this and if needed it will pop up a terminal window where the root password can be typed. For this to work the root prompt has to end in #.
This doesn't work for RPM packages, because they are handled internally by .

Installing Packages
To install a package you can
locate the package you wish to install in , drag it onto a running copy of
click on a package file in and start a new copy of
use on the Open menu items in
selecting an available package in the package tree
For a selected package, use the buttons in the right panel, the Fetch button will fetch the package from a remote source and display detailed information, the Install button pops up the installation window.
For marked packages, use the button in the left panel, the Install Marked button pops up the install window.
The install window lists the packages to be installed and allows the setting of install options. The panel on the right is an integrated terminal window in which the installation programs are run, for interactive installation programs the interaction is done in this window.
RPM packages are handled slightly differently from other package types, since the installation is done directly by , the right panel is only used for error messages.

Uninstalling Packages
A selected package can be uninstalled by using the Uninstall button in the right panel, this brings up a window with the uninstall options, the Uninstall button in the window causes the packages to be uninstalled, and the right panel provides an integrated terminal window for the uninstall programs.
Marked packages can be uninstalled using the Uninstall Marked button in the left panel.