i should be working (but i'm fixing my computer).

Nothing much to report with KDE 4.2.1, which is a good thing I suppose.

...

I seem to be packing more widgets onto the desktop and more widgets onto the panels without plasma losing its mind. The icons in my slim panel have settled down to an appropriate size.

--Later: Not so much. Plasma borked, had to roll back to my saved plasma*.rc's. Which, unfortunately, had not been very recently saved...

I'm still not sure I understand what all the fuss has been about. I don't have all the widgets running I would like to use, of course, because I am being cautious about adding new ones in -- lest I again destabilize the desktop. (However, I have in fact been adding a few more, without any recent disasters.)

Right at the moment, I have a bunch of Google widgets on my desktop. So, my computer is running 4-5 F degs. hotter than without them. Part of this is that the pretty neat "world webcams" widget updates every 20 secs. The options claim you can set updates to as slow as every 3 mins. (Which used to work, actually.) But right at the moment, options won't save.

Google widgets seem to run on one desktop instead of all of them, the way plasma widgets do. I have found that if I "exit" the google widget tray icon instead of just shutting down, the gadget location seems to be "saved" even though none of the options are saving at the moment.

So, I've sort of been wondering, why am I using plasma? Right at the moment, I'm running plasma on top of KWin, but in a Gnome login. I've got two kde 3.5 kicker panels, two Gnome panels (hidden), two kde 4.2 plasma panels and one cairo-dock panel. I don't really need any of this of course -- I could get by just fine on panels from one system or the other. The google gadgets give me lots of desktop toys -- as far as I can tell, the primary purpose of the big change from KDE 3.5 to KDE 4 plasma. I like the plasma look a bit better, but other than that? Well, running all these systems simultaneously doesn't seem to have a particular downside I have come across and on the other hand, it lets me keep in touch with any new changes that are showing up anywhere.

(I've been using Gnome login rather than KDE 4.2 login because the Gnome NetworkManager interface will get me static connections, where as the KDE 4 interface is still limiting itself to DHCP connections for whatever reason.)

Every now and then I test "compiz" because I'm running the compiz fusion-icon to switch between windows managers. But, I have yet to get any windows boxes or effects once I switch to compiz. Don't know why, as it used to work some time ago. Something is clearly borked. (Maybe I have some defective configuration files ... I better experiment with this in another user.)

And so, that's the latest. I did read a report on KDE Planet or somewhere that at least one person experienced the plasma crash/meltdown upon updating to 4.2.1 on Gentoo. Like me, he discovered that killing of the plasma configuration files in .kde4 will allow a rebuild of the plasma desktop without kill all the other user settings.

Thank you for visiting and have a pleasant tomorrow.

_____________________

Weird Okular thing -- when I duplex print and do not open the Properties dialog, then Okular prints A4, even though the default is set to US Letter. Which is an annoying problem, as my printer requires a hardware setting change for A4. But, if I open the Properties dialog, I get US Letter output, even though I haven't made any changes because US Letter is already the setting.