[kde-linux] lost part of shell screen

[Dennis Foreman]

-----Original Message-----
From: kde-linux-bounces at kde.org [mailto:kde-linux-bounces at kde.org] On Behalf
Of Duncan
Sent: Friday, August 31, 2012 5:53 AM
To: kde-linux at kde.org
Subject: Re: [kde-linux] lost part of shell screen

Anne Wilson posted on Fri, 31 Aug 2012 09:32:51 +0100 as excerpted:

> On 31/08/12 01:22, Dennis Foreman wrote:

>> Yes, the menu bar for Konqueror. I
>> use a fullscreen interface provided by my IT people in a virtual
>> machine environment. I have figured out that the GUI and the shell are
>> not the same and I apologize (again) for having used the wrong term.
>> 
> Something odd there, then, since Ctrl-m does hide or show the menu bar
> in my Konqueror.  Sorry, I've really no idea what has caused your
> corruption.
> 
> As a matter of interest, did you delete konquerorrc or rename it?  If
> you renamed it you could check them alongside each other, or diff them. 
> At least you would then learn what had gone wrong.

This konqueror-as-shell thing is more than a bit confusing to me here 
too, Anne, but here's a couple possibilities:

1) KDE's keyboard shortcuts are configurable.  It's quite possible that 
either DF for his IT people reconfigured the show/hide menu shortcut to 
something else, or simply disabled it.

2) This shell thing very possibly may take advantage of KDE's "kiosk 
mode" to try to lock out certain settings in ordered to limit variance 
for support purposes, etc.  I'm not familiar with kiosk mode having never 
done anything with it, but this sounds very much like the sort of stuff 
certain IT departments would be keen on, and while they likely didn't 
intend the menu or whatever to disappear, some bug obviously triggered 
that with the background change, and he might have been prevented from 
getting it back by the very same settings that would have been intended 
to keep a user from accidentally losing it (hitting ctrl-m accidentally 
and not knowing what they did) in the first place.

Just a couple thoughts on something that's evidently rather far from a 
standard kde config, so most of our experience and troubleshooting 
knowledge based on that more or less standard config just went right out 
the window! =:^(

Luckily the old "delete the config and revert to defaults (even if those 
defaults are anything but standard as shipped by kde) trick seemed to 
work, and even luckier, he figured it out without much help from here, 
because as I said, this thing is far enough from standard it definitely 
has /me/ flummoxed! 

Regardless, this is one for the experience archives, so if something like 
this comes up again, maybe we we can be of at least a bit more help than 
we were this time around. =:^\  Thank goodness he /was/ able to figure 
this one out pretty much without our help, because "flummoxed" 
unfortunately pretty well describes it!

-- 
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

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Thanks, Duncan, for the kind words for a relative newbie. I am using Redhat
Enterprise in an IBM VM virtual machine, accessed via TightVNC. I don't
think the IT folks have done much tinkering with the configuration, because
that is not their primary job. Where I think the menu disappeared is right
after I installed program (gftp). The install went fine and left an icon on
the desktop. I tried to drag it to the menubar, but it did not "stick". It
is possible that, in trying it a few times, I may have kept the mouse-button
held down and dragged downward from the menubar, THINKING I still had a hold
on the icon, which seemed to be sliding under the menu bar.
Why did I do it that way? Because it works in Windows, which is my primary
system. I was thinking of the GUI menubar as the Windows taskbar, NOT as an
application menubar. I do not think of a GUI as an application, though I
know it is in Linux. 
What made it more confusing is that there was no icon or other area to click
on to get control of the menubar or restore it. CTRL-m or CTRL-M did nothing
in this environment. When I pressed the ctrl key, I noticed the TightVNC
CTRL-key-icon flash, but I do not understand why.

PS. When I reply to emails, my email client always positions my reply at the
top, which is why I top-posted.