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

[david]

Duncan wrote:
> 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.

I did widen the panel. Didn't get any transparency, even though 
transparency works for the main kicker panel I keep at the bottom of the 
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.

Yep, the knewsticker app gives the segfault. The kicker applet works.

> 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 kde3 feed that's no longer active, or something.

The default feed was the existing one from kde-look.org, which works 
just fine.

> 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.

That's good.

> 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.

Too bad it's necessary to use a text terminal. Perhaps worth having a 
script for it, with a link on the desktop to let you run the script.

> 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.

Interesting and very geeky. Thanks.

-- 
David
gnome at hawaii.rr.com
authenticity, honesty, community