more on plasome

By basd on Feb 9, 2009 | In kde4, opensuse

I've been reasonably successful using plasome. That is, running plasma on KWin, in a Gnome session.

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This is working out perhaps a bit better than my icekd34omows, because I use a lot of icons to quick-start thing, including links to a few websites.

Of course, the problem with using "plasome" is that it is reliant on plasma/kde4 -- so it is not a truly "parallel" system to use when kde 4 borks. Life is full of trade-offs, I guess.

Plasma panels and icons can shrink pretty small, allowing a lot of icons. This may be my downfall, however. Plasma seems to use a "container"concept for both desktop items and panel items. These are recorded in plasmarc and plasma-appletsrc found in .kde4/share/config.

Plasma seems to have problems with containers and geometry for me both on startup and shutdown. I am guessing there is a cache problem or a buffer problem affecting the reading and writing of the desktop data.

I edited the plasma-appletsrc to remove some widgets that were refusing to disappear. This got rid of them, but did not solve the geometry problem. However, as far as I can tell, the geometry is correct in plasma-appletsrc. So, I have to assume the problem is one that occurs on reading the file.

But, as far as the cache during the session - it seems sufficient, since I can reorganize the desktop and it will function just fine until I log out and log back in.

There also seem to be some extraneous / redundant entries, but I haven't tried removing them yet because I'm uncertain whether they are redundant or not. For instance, my clock has a whole list of extension sub-containers -- but I think these are just multiple instances of the same extension. I'll have to experiment.

In the meantime, it seems that the kde4networking still refuses to open Kwallet, so connections don't work. But, when running in a Gnome session (which stores the same data in either its own "wallet" or simply has a different interface to the wallet data), kde4networking seems to show the correct status of the various connections.

So, I am more or less running KDE 4.2, but just in a Gnome session in order to obtain network management.

BTW, my plasma panels are somewhat randomly "blue" or "not blue" (ergo, black). This randomness occurs at log in, and stays set during the session. Sometimes one is blue, sometimes two and sometimes all three.

Maybe I should learn how to file bug reports. I've reported bugs in other systems before, without much success -- typically a developer fails to duplicate the problem and closes the bug. Or, alternatively, I get told the problem is fixed in the next release (which ultimately does not solve my problem; and which may or may not actually be true).

That's okay with me -- I'm not paying the developers to fix anything for me after all. But, I guess I'll just stick with my "whine reports" here in the blog for now.

Perhaps someone else will find my various work-arounds useful if they are experiencing similar problems.