observations

By basd on Mar 25, 2009 | In kde4, linux, opensuse

I seem to have found the threshold number of widgets before plasma becomes unstable on my system and also now I know how to kill and restart plasma.

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I have six widgts on the desktop and three added icons to the default panel. Seems stable. I added three more icons to the panel and then widgets started moving around when I logged out and logged back in.

I came across the "bespin" theme which has something called xbar which might be useful. But, it's an svn from KDE-Look.org. So, I retrieved and compiled it -- all went well. But, although I can find the bespin executable, I can't actually find where the theme folder went to. Hmmm.

In the process of trying to make this work, I found a new command: "kquitapp plasma", which will shut down plasma but leave the desktop functional. In a normal install this might be reason for panic, because there would be nothing on the desktop (though you can continue to use alt f2 to run applications). But, since I run kde 3.5 kicker panels and cairo-dock, it opened up new interesting possibilities -- plasma-less kde 4.2. The only problem I have without plasma relates to icons for launching kde 4 programs that have kde 3.5 versions -- if launched from kicker, I get the 3.5 version. (Haven't yet tested to see what happens from the Cairo-dock panel.

BTW, you can turn plasma back on by running it from the alt f2 launcher.

Google gadgets will run on the desktop without plasma - but for some reason I'm getting 50%+ cpu usage, which doesn't happen with plasma loaded.

KDE 4.2 is successfully logging into unencrypted wireless connections for me, but not into encrypted ones.

Something weird is happening when I log out and then log into a Gnome session. It takes a really long time for the gnome panel to come up, even though the cpu is running at "1%"; the desktop displays the home folder instead of desktop, and the keyboard interface is on permanent "slow". There is a lot of flickering in the text on my kicker panel, so there is some sort of scan going on I think.

But, in any event, it works best to fully shutdown and reboot, then gnome is okay.

My OpenSUSE updates are running about 500 meg+ per day, mostly kde 4.2.