Mark Knecht posted on Sun, 03 Apr 2011 09:58:41 -0700 as excerpted: > I've got a KDE problem. I needed to move a monitor on one dual-screen > KDE box to a different machine. I physically removed what was the second > monitor, modified the xorg.conf file to remove all references to the > second screen and rebooted. I now get a normal login screen with entries > boxes in the middle of what is now the only monitor attached to the > system. However once I log in I get only wallpaper and don't see any > panel/taskbar at the bottom of the screen. > As KDE doesn't even give the option to open a terminal using a right > click I don't know how to proceed.
KDE 1 was a long time ago. I didn't know it had dual monitor support? But the only time it doesn't make sense to include the kde version is before there's other versions to talk about, so you /must/ be talking about something in the kde1 era, right? =;^P Seriously, version number can make a difference. kde4's multi-monitor support has improved dramatically over time, and particularly plasma had some bugs in that regard as late as 4.5. I've not personally seen any in 4.6, but then I've not done a whole lot that might provoke them in 4.6 either, so I can't be sure the ones I experienced in 4.5 have been fixed. By the 4.2.4 at which I originally switched, kde4 /was/ useful in multi- monitor mode, but there were /significant/ bugs with it, some of which have only been fixed recently. FWIW, I've not updated from 4.6.1 yet tho 4.6.2 is or should be out pretty quickly. But at least the gentoo/kde folks mentioned 4.6.1 had some regressions in it due to confusion from the currently underway upstream kde transfer svn -> git -- the 4.6.1 tarballs pulled the wrong one in some cases, resulting in code that wasn't release-ready being released. So try either 4.6.0 or 4.6.2 on 4.6, or the last 4.5 release, 4.5.5 if you're uncomfortable with 4.6 still, staying away from 4.6.1. If you're running something earlier than 4.5.3, I'd definitely recommend upgrading, as early 4.5 series had graphics bugs on certain hardware and I'd honestly not consider anything pre-4.5 release quality kde4 at all. But to work around the current issue... kde4 has multiple launch methods. The kickoff or alternative launch menu on a panel is only one. Just because it has disappeared does NOT mean you can't launch anything. krunner: krunner (kde4's run dialog) should still work, for one (tho before 4.5 it was buggy and prone to crashing, so could often go unresponsive). You can either use it directly, or launch konsole from it and then use konsole to run whatever. There are two ways to access krunner even without the usual launch menu. The first is keyboard shortcut, the default being Alt-F2. This being kde, that's naturally configurable, but if you configured something else, presumably you'd remember your own run dialog shortcut. The second is the run command... option in the default desktop context menu. It's worth noting however that from kde 4.5, the usual secondary- button desktop context-click action is configurable, and may trigger something other than the default context menu. Should this be the case, you can click on "the cashew" aka toolbox icon, generally located at the corner or edge of the screen, choose desktop settings, in the resulting dialog choose mouse actions, and check and/or reconfigure actions there, so you have a "standard menu" context menu again. While you're there, if you like, you can even configure an "application launcher" action that'll give you the usual application menu. Here, I have ctrl-left-click set to activate that. (I wish they had an option to trigger krunner there. If so, I'd probably configure that for some mouse action too, but the option isn't available, so the closest it gets is the "standard menu", which as mentioned has the run command... option on it.) Desktop plasmoids: In plasma, the desktop itself can contain plasmoids or widgets. You can add a kickoff, classic, or lancelot menu directly to the desktop activity, if desired. Widgets must first be unlocked to allow this, however, so use either the desktop context (standard) menu or the cashew to unlock widgets if necessary, then again to add widgets. There's an application launcher category you can select to show only launcher widgets, or pick from the big list if you like. The folderview plasmoid (or layout if you've chosen that rather than the standard desktop layout) can sort of be used as a launcher as well, alto it's a bit more difficult. If you click on a directory or use the folderview context menu option to "open with dolphin", you should get dolphin or whatever else you've configured as your default file manager. >From there, you can navigate to /usr/bin or whatever, and click on a binary to open it directly. Back in the kde3 era, kwin was at one point unstable and used to die on me, leaving me without a method to focus a particular window (the open dialog or a konsole) in ordered to type in "kwin" and launch it again. But direct mouse-clicking still worked, and I was able to click a directory on the desktop to launch the file manager (konqueror back then), then use it to navigate to /usr/bin and click on the kwin binary to launch it directly. =:^) Of course if you don't have a folderview in view on the desktop, you may have to add one using add-widgets as above, and you may prefer to add a launcher instead. Monitor Reconfiguration: Once you have one of the launch methods above working, you can launch kcontrol (umm... systemsettings, even tho they aren't in general system settings but rather kde settings for an individual user, so the kde3 name kcontrol is more accurate, why they switched to the less accurate and less googlable generic term for kde4 I don't know, but I obviously don't agree with it). In kcontrol you can use hardware, display and monitor, size and orientation (4.5+ path, pre-4.5 had a different kcontrol layout) to reconfigure your monitors as necessary. It's worth noting that in kde4 previous to about 4.4 (I believe it was either 4.3.1 or 4.4.1 that fixed it, but don't recall which), there were **SIGNIFICANT** bugs with this kcontrol applet and multi-monitor mode for some users (both the Radeon graphics (freedomware drivers of course) on my main machine and the Intel graphics on my netbook were affected), but again, those seem to have been fixed by 4.5, and the bug shouldn't affect people with only a single monitor or those switching back to a single monitor from multi-monitor mode anyway. Keyboard shortcuts: Finally, in addition to remembering your krunner keyboard shortcut in case plasma decides to go haywire again, it may be worth configuring a shortcut for konsole or the like, as well, just in case krunner is crashed too. The three launching methods, keyboard shortcut, krunner, and plasma, are deliberately independent of each other, so crashes in one shouldn't take down the other two and you should always have at least one of the three available. There's actually several ways of configuring app launcher shortcuts in kde. First, in kcontrol, under common appearance and behavior, shortcuts and gestures, custom shortcuts (again, 4.5+ location, pre-4.5 kcontrol layout was different), you have the master control. There should be a KMenuEdit entry there, which you can enable or disable. With the kmenuedit entry enabled, you can use kmenuedit to setup a shortcut for any entry in your applications menu. kmenuedit is kde's application menu editor, activated by selecting the edit applications option from kickoff or alternative menu context menus, or run kmenuedit directly from krunner, konsole, or kickoff's search entry. Alternatively, you can create an independent keyboard or mouse gesture shortcut in kcontrol's custom shortcuts, directly. Using this method, the app doesn't have to be listed in kde's apps menu, so it's handy for launching scripts, non-X binaries, or anything else that simply doesn't have an apps menu entry. The framework used is actually quite flexible and as mentioned, allows mouse gestures, etc, as triggers as well. Further, you can configure actions other than launching apps. Konqueror gestures are available for example, but you can choose between window context specific and global application and between mouse and keyboard input. The triggered action can be launching an app, launching a URL (using standard kde associations to decide what to do with it), keyboard output, or dbus actions, so as I said, the custom shortcuts framework used really is quite flexible, indeed. =:^) Hope that's useful. =:^) -- 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 ___________________________________________________ This message is from the kde-linux mailing list. Account management: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-linux. Archives: http://lists.kde.org/. More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.
