[kde-linux] Desktop widget like Windows Vista sidebar/clock thing?

[Duncan]

david posted on Tue, 06 Oct 2009 00:14:50 -1000 as excerpted:

> Thanks. I added a vertical panel, added the analog clock, KDE3
> apparently doesn't let me tweak the width of the panel or anything.
> Adding the KDE3 newsticker app gave me a segfault. And now my taskbar
> appears to be gone (sounds like eye candy can be dangerous) ... oh,
> well, I think I'll just ignore this request of hers unless she brings it
> up.

You should be able to tweak panel width.  I'm not sure what the limit was 
based on (IOW, it may have been screen pixel size, so smaller screens 
would have been lower max sizes), but on a horizontal kicker panel, the 
first/original panel would let me set upto 256 px height, IIRC, while 
added panels actually allowed larger, 300 height.  That was on a 1200 px 
high screen.

IIRC one could select from a range of presets (tiny, small, normal, 
large, huge) plus a "custom" size, which allowed the 256 or 300 high 
horizontal.  I know I had vertical panels as well part of the time, and 
they were adjustable too, but didn't use them as much, so IDR what the 
max width was.

The trick was to find a "bare" spot to right-click on, because many of 
the widgets didn't include the panel menu.

I'm not sure whether you were just being a bit sloppy with your 
description or whether you actually tried to embed the app itself, but 
note that you would NOT embed the knewsticker app, which is stand-alone, 
but the knewsticker kicker applet.  I'm not sure how one would even 
attempt to embed the app itself in the kicker panel, but if figured out a 
way to try, yeah, I can see that segfaulting, since it would need the 
applet, not the full app.

FWIW, you may have better luck running the knewsticker app stand-alone to 
set it up, then when at least one working feed is configured, trying to 
add it then in the panel.  It's possible that the default feed was for a 
kde3 feed that's no longer active, or something.

As for the segfaulting, yes, unfortunately, in both kde3/kicker and kde4/
plasma, a misbehaving applet can take down the whole kicker/plasma main 
app.  That's because it's all running in the same single-app memory 
space, without the normal cross-app protections.  kde3 and kde4 deal with 
that in a bit different ways.  In kde3, kicker was only the panels, so 
the desktop still worked.  In kde4, plasma is desktop and panels, but it 
does tend to restart a bit more reliably than kde3's kicker did.

What I took to doing, however, was ensuring I had a konsole running any 
time I was experimenting with something.  If kicker died, I could simply 
restart it from konsole.  Or, if you have a konqueror session running, 
you can probably use it to browse to whatever the system kde bindir is
(/usr/bin, maybe), find kicker, and start it that way.  Or a kate or 
kwrite window has an optional konsole pane that can be activated.  Or, 
switch to a text-mode terminal and start it from there, tho you'll 
probably need the display setting (probably 0:0 or simply :0) in ordered 
to do that.  The point is, it's usually restartable, if one is 
sufficiently creative with the existing running apps, or from a text mode 
VT login, if necessary.

Of course, a crashed app normally takes an recent changes you've made to 
its config with it.  So what I'd do if I had problems with that, would be 
after a change that "took" but before anything else too risky, I'd use 
killall to send a SIGTERM to kicker, which would cause it to close, 
saving its data.  I could then restart it, which would of course use the 
newly saved config, and I could then try the risky operation without 
having to worry about losing any painstakingly configured new settings, 
since I had just saved the settings.

-- 
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