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

okay, so this a.m. one computer was asleep and refused to wake up & another one had a weird white bar down the side. I knew there had been too many days of things working pretty good.

...

Well, the main computer I just powered down & it seems to be working okay.

The music server -- of which I had just yesterday mentioned some improvements and success with Banshee -- had the weird white stripe. I suspected it was some sort of widget, but a right-click would not tell me anything. So, I ran some updates, changed the plasma theme, rebooted a couple of times -- no, still there.

But in the meantime I accidentally upgraded to KDE 4.3, which hadn't been my intention, but apparently I did not change this computer away from the Factory repository, so I should have known this was coming.

So ... I discovered that suddenly 3d effects now work on this rather old Toshiba. They had worked in the KDE 4 beta stage, but then disappeared -- and I have been questioning my sanity as to whether they ever actually worked or it was just my imagination.

Then I discovered a link for Cairo-Dock in the kde menu under "system>more packages". And starting Cairo-Dock from the "no OpenGL" link brings back transparency to Cairo-Dock. (Which is strange, because I don't get transparency when I select "no OpenGL" from the startup that offers the option. Also, I thought I had tried starting with the no OpenGL option from a command line and it hadn't resulted in transparency. But, maybe there were some new updates, I don't know ...)

BTW, Cairo-Dock also now works correctly on my main computer, starting it from the menu icon. Well, except that it does a weird thing splitting the icons in two.

I thought that maybe I would need to delete the configuration directory for plasma and start anew, so I logged into IceWM for this purpose -- only to discover the white bar had followed me to this desktop as well! That pretty much ruled out a problem with plasma -- and in fact, it was pretty obvious it was related to kde3.5 kicker, which I run in IceWM. So, as it turns out, for some unknown reason a "docking panel" had mysteriously added itself to kicker overnight.

So, I'm un-snafued again, but it was a weird morning.

The transition to kde4.3 seems to have gone fine, although there may be some missing widgets (eg., I think the "spacer" for the panel has once again disappeared.) But, my music server is fairly widget-free, so all is (seemingly) well.

And here's something interesting -- the plasma "add widgets" widget now has an option to retrieve google gadets. (Well, it had this back in the beta days, too.)

Don't get too excited -- there are only four google gadgets that show up when you try to add google gadgets. And, they are all widgets similar to ones in plasma. And, the one I tested (World Daylight Alarm) has incomprehensible options.

But then again, if this keeps progressing in the right direction, we may soon have a wealth of google gadgets that can be added to the plasma desktop. That will be useful.

And that's the news this a.m.

Thank you for visiting and have a pleasant tomorrow.