[kde-linux] Locking widgets doesn't work correctly

[Duncan]

Abos Undso posted on Mon, 31 Aug 2009 09:40:32 +0200 as excerpted:

> I have KDE 4.2 installed. I personalized the bottom panel (task bar)
> according to my needs with the icons and spaces I require. Once happy
> with the looks, I locked the widgets. However, every time I restart the
> computer, the icons are displaced and the spacers have a different size
> :-( Why aren't the widgets really locked when I lock them? Is there a
> way to avoid them being jumbled up?

Two comments:

First, note that plasma (thus the desktop and panels) is still under 
heavy development, and every kde4 version so far has had significant bug 
fixes and the like.  4.3.0 is out and for me /much/ more smoothly 
functional than 4.2.4 was.  You may wish to upgrade, if your distribution 
has 4.3.0 available.  FWIW, 4.3.1 should be coming out pretty quickly, 
now, with even more fixes.  

Second, I've noted that sometimes plasma doesn't shut down properly when 
the computer (or simply kde) is shutdown.  When that happens, it doesn't 
get to save its settings, and sometimes they revert back the next time it 
starts.

What I do here to ensure that changes "take", is after I've made changes 
that I want to make sure stay around, I issue a killall plasma-desktop 
command, from either krunner, or an open konsole window.  Then I restart 
it with simply the plasma-desktop command.  (Note that krunner can be 
triggered by a hotkey, as well.  The default is alt-F2, IIRC.  Thus, you 
don't need plasma desktop running to get a krunner, and from it to launch 
plasma desktop again, as long as you know and use the shortcut.  Or 
simply use konsole...)

killall <name> sends the selected signal to all applications named 
<name>.  The default signal is TERM, terminate, which is polite enough to 
let the application in question save its work first, or even refuse to 
die if it wants.  That is of course what we want here, plasma to save its 
work, so killall <name> is fine.  If we wanted to kill the app without 
giving it a chance to save its work (or if it didn't want to die), we'd 
use killall -KILL <name>.  Similarly, we could use -STOP and -CONT to 
suspend operation temporarily, and then continue it, if we wanted.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman