Disabling plasma desktop background

[Duncan]

Kevin Krammer posted on Thu, 20 Jan 2011 17:22:19 +0100 as excerpted:

> On Thursday, 2011-01-20, Stephen Kell wrote:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> Can I turn off the plasma desktop background (i.e. the window that gets
>> mapped over the root window) without killing plasma?
>> 
>> I want to use plasma mainly for the applets like knetworkmanager, and
>> don't want to lose access to my plain old X11 root window.  I tried
>> "remove this desktop activity" but in the case of the desktop
>> background it appears to do nothing. This is in KDE 4.4.2 (Ubuntu
>> Lucid) -- apologies if there are relevant changes in subsequent
>> versions.
> 
> Very good question.
> 
> I think in Plasma terminology all areas which can hold widgets are
> called containments.
> I had a look into plasma-desktop-appletsrc and there seems to one for
> the desktop (has a  line like plugin=desktop).
> 
> You could try removing that containment from your config.

Good thinking!  (Wish it had occurred to me!)  I wonder if it doesn't have 
a desktop then, or if it defaults to the default new-user desktop?  I 
guess we'll soon find out.

Approached from the other direction, it's possible to run individual 
plasmoids (plasma applets) "standalone" using the plasmoidviewer 
application.  This is useful for plasmoid developers, etc, but it could 
come in useful here as well.  I've never fooled around with it so don't 
know if it can run individual containments such as panels, but the --help 
output lists switches to select them, so it might be made to work.  
Certainly it's worth experimenting with, anyway.

There's also plasma-windowed, which appears to be a simpler version of 
plasmoidviewer, from its help.

plasma-overlay is designed as a screensaver activated plasma container.  
I've experimented just a bit with it (configuring it with a single huge 
analog clock could be useful in its original purpose, IIRC it has a single 
analog clock but much smaller by default), but I tend toward shutting off 
the monitors rather than using screensavers, and since I don't have kdm 
installed (I start kde from a CLI login using a script that sets vars and 
invokes startx), it lacks a greeter applet and thus won't lock the screen, 
so it's of rather limited use here.  But I'm guessing it could be used as 
a plasma-desktop/plasma-netbook alternative, invoked on demand like you 
would a screensaver (hotcorner/hotkey launched, etc).

(FWIW, I used bash tab-completion on plasm... to generate a listing of 
commands, then investigated the ones that looked interesting using --help, 
to come up with the list of potentially appropos apps, above.)

-- 
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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