LiFE Exam

[Thomas Weissel]

hello everybody,
it seems i've found out something that at least points into the right
direction.

when i tried the activity switcher on both - a correct boot that loaded my
desktop settings and a faulty boot that for some reason replaced the
desktop containment with a folder view - only one of them showed the
"activity side bar"

when the desktop containment is replaced it seems to be activity related..
the sidebar doesn't show on "meta+tab" because there is no active activity
to switch to..

the desktop context menu shows the sidebar but it is empty even if my
"default" activity is still visible in the settings dialog  ?? what do you
think?
it should show the "currently being used" activity.. not nothing!

(i attached a screenshot of the settings dialog and the sidebar)
[image: activitysidebar.png]

this is how it should look like
[image: Screenshot_20201019_115210.png]




thx in advance
thomas



On Sun, Oct 18, 2020 at 11:38 PM Thomas Weissel <valueerror at gmail.com>
wrote:

> hey johan,
> thank you for your answer!
>
> i did take a look at kscreen and actually found 2 entries - i don't know
> where the second one is coming from..
>
> so i removed everything in the kscreen directory.. rebooted and then
> created a new image
> first it looked like this fixed the problem but then... after 14 reboots
> of the virtual machine it loaded the default plasma settings again :-(
> "desktop containment" was rewritten to an empty "folder view" and noone
> knows why this happens...
>
> another look at "kscreen" inside of the VM showed that a new element was
> created "name":"Virtual1"   - but this element is created every single time
> and everything works as expected... except when it doesn't ;-)
>
> so i guess this should not be the problem
>
> cheers thomas
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Fri, Oct 16, 2020 at 5:41 PM Johan Ouwerkerk <jm.ouwerkerk at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Oct 14, 2020 at 9:01 PM Thomas Weissel <valueerror at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> >
>> > the project "life-exam" https://life-edu.eu/exam.html strongly relies
>> on the features and capabilities of plasmashell.
>> > the kiosk system is at the heart of the project and the sheer number of
>> configuration options this shell provides makes all of this possible in the
>> first place.
>> > so at first, i want to say thank you!
>> >
>> > sometimes i run into a bug and because you have helped me iron out many
>> of those bugs before i'm trying again - cause this time this bug is a
>> showstopper.
>> > (it happens not just at first boot but when students switch into the
>> exam environment too)
>> >
>> > https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=423421
>> >
>> > for no reason plasmashell randomly RECONFIGURES a perfectly fine setup.
>> but not the entire setup - it switches from "desktopcontainment" to
>> "folder" and all widgets and the wallpaper are lost..
>> > usually those widgets are preserved (at least on a manual switch) .. it
>> does not create a new activity.. the "default" activity - even the activity
>> icon is still the "original"
>> >
>> >
>>
>> A similar (maybe identical) thing used to drive me nuts on this Debian
>> unstable system. I eventually traced it back to kscreen getting
>> confused about the proper display configuration, which led it to feed
>> a new (fresh) config to KDED/Plasma which in turn would respond with
>> some 'helpful' defaults that effectively reset my preferences. The
>> system would make a mess of the following configuration:
>>
>>  - What the "primary" screen should be
>>  - What the resulting geometry/layout should be
>>  - In general, the logical ordering of displays (i.e. is the HDMI
>> connection considered to be display 0, 1, or 2?)
>>  - And what my preferred desktop containment, background etc. should
>> be for the affected displays
>>
>> This seemed to be related to the question of which one of HDMI,
>> DisplayPort or internal display (eDP) would be probed and found first.
>> That order isn't inherently stable and apparently it would confuse the
>> kscreen stack. For context: I have a multi-monitor setup with a laptop
>> (so on eDP display) and two identical monitors (one connected via HDMI
>> the other via DisplayPort).
>>
>> I'm no longer certain which of the following actions eventually helped
>> to 'fix' that:
>>
>>  - At a certain point I removed the entire ~/.local/share/kscreen/
>> directory
>>  - Upgrading various components. Currently I'm running kscreen 5.17,
>> plasma-desktop 5.14
>>
>> Hope it helps.
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> - Johan Ouwerkerk
>>
>
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