On Saturday 11 Feb 2012 18:51:41 Will Stephenson wrote:

On Saturday 11 Feb 2012 12:27:42 Ken Schneider -

openSUSE wrote:

...

Just upgraded KDE from 4.7 to 4.8 and all of the icons

on my desktop

...

went missing. Is there a way to restore what I had

short of recreating

...

them manually?

My guess is that they are still there, but 4.8 has started showing a different Activity than the one that has icons on the desktop. Can you pop open the activities switcher and see if your original activity is there and shows your icons again when activated? If not, I'd like to (privately) look at your post-upgrade ~/.kde4/share/config/plasma-desktop-appletsrc (please scan for private data first). And please indicate if your icons were 1) inside a Folder View widget on the desktop 2) individual Icons on the desktop or 3) Part of a Folder View layout as the entire desktop

Ken sent me his config file, which does contain config for Icon widgets on the desktop (case 2)), and copied it into a test user's .kde4/share/config, and the icons are visible as expected. So I'm no wiser what is going on on Ken's system. There is a regular desktop on screen -1 (the default) and grid desktop defined on screen 0 with a few other icons, so I assume that Ken has two screens. Perhaps this is the root of a configuration migration problem. Having screens numbered -1 and 0 seems iffy but I would have to check if something has changed with screen numbering in Plasma's config in 4.8, and I need to retest with the KR48 rpms (I'm on a git build here) and a second screen, which I can do back in the office next week. Will -- Will Stephenson, openSUSE Board, Booster, KDE Developer SUSE LINUX GmbH, GF: Jeff Hawn, Jennifer Guild, Felix Imendörffer, HRB 21284 (AG Nürnberg) Maxfeldstraße 5 90409 Nürnberg Germany -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

On Sunday 12 Feb 2012 07:40:07 Ken Schneider - openSUSE wrote:

I did change the desktop to a grid desktop and added the icons/widgets that I could recall I was using. No clue why my original icon setup was missing including my favorite background picture.

Ok, so the griddesktop was only added after the upgrade that lost the icons? Do you have a backup of the file from before the upgrade? Will -- Will Stephenson, openSUSE Board, Booster, KDE Developer SUSE LINUX GmbH, GF: Jeff Hawn, Jennifer Guild, Felix Imendörffer, HRB 21284 (AG Nürnberg) Maxfeldstraße 5 90409 Nürnberg Germany -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

On 02/12/2012 09:29 AM, phanisvara das pecked at the keyboard and wrote:

On Sun, 12 Feb 2012 18:59:13 +0530, Will Stephenson wrote:

...

On Sunday 12 Feb 2012 07:40:07 Ken Schneider - openSUSE wrote:

...

I did change the desktop to a grid desktop and added the icons/widgets that I could recall I was using. No clue why my original icon setup was missing including my favorite background picture.

Ok, so the griddesktop was only added after the upgrade that lost the icons? Do you have a backup of the file from before the upgrade?

and do you remember which location your desktop was set to display icons / shortcuts from? by default it's ~/Desktop. what's in your ~/Desktop folder (or whichever you used for this) now? are the .desktop files gone?

That only gets used if you have a folder view, IIANM. -- Ken Schneider SuSe since Version 5.2, June 1998 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

On 02/12/2012 01:33 PM, phanisvara das pecked at the keyboard and wrote:

On Sun, 12 Feb 2012 23:15:45 +0530, Ken Schneider - openSUSE wrote:

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On 02/12/2012 09:29 AM, phanisvara das pecked at the keyboard and wrote:

That only gets used if you have a folder view, IIANM.

i'm sorry, perhaps i got this wrong. i was under the impression that you had icons directly on your desktop. not widgets, small plasma applications, but icons that start individual applications, i.e., your whole desktop was one single folder view. if that wasn't the case, i misunderstood something down the road.

I don't use folder view, all I use is desktop mode. And call them what you will to me they are still icons that are copied to the desktop from the Kmenu (little green gecko). -- Ken Schneider SuSe since Version 5.2, June 1998 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

On Monday 13 February 2012 07:40:18 phanisvara das wrote:

On Mon, 13 Feb 2012 04:21:37 +0530, Ken Schneider - openSUSE

wrote:

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On 02/12/2012 01:33 PM, phanisvara das pecked at the keyboard and wrote:

...

On Sun, 12 Feb 2012 23:15:45 +0530, Ken Schneider - openSUSE

wrote:

...

On 02/12/2012 09:29 AM, phanisvara das pecked at the keyboard and wrote:

That only gets used if you have a folder view, IIANM.

i'm sorry, perhaps i got this wrong. i was under the impression that you had icons directly on your desktop. not widgets, small plasma applications, but icons that start individual applications, i.e., your whole desktop was one single folder view. if that wasn't the case, i misunderstood something down the road.

I don't use folder view, all I use is desktop mode. And call them what you will to me they are still icons that are copied to the desktop from the Kmenu (little green gecko).

if you can copy icons directly to the desktop, that means your desktop is in folder view mode, and uses a directory like ~/Desktop to store those icons, as .desktop files.

but i'm afraid we're talking in circles here; i'll leave this to w. stephenon, who's seen your config. files, and should know exactly what is what on your desktop.

I do, and he doesn't use folder view mode AND does (did?) have icons on his desktop. If you drag an application from the menu, or a file from Dolphin, to the desktop, or right click an app in the menu and choose Add To Desktop, an Icon widget is created directly on the desktop containment, no FolderView needed. KDE 4.0 veterans will recall this was the only way to have icons on the desktop, and FolderView was introduced later so that we had all the sorting, multiple selection, layout options that were familiar from kdesktop. Will -- Will Stephenson | openSUSE Board, openSUSE Boosters Team, KDE Developer SUSE LINUX GmbH, GF: Jeff Hawn, Jennifer Guild, Felix Imendörffer, HRB 21284 (AG Nürnberg) Maxfeldstraße 5 90409 Nürnberg Germany -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

On Monday 13 Feb 2012 16:43:42 phanisvara das wrote:

On Mon, 13 Feb 2012 15:49:02 +0530, Will Stephenson

wrote:

...

I do, and he doesn't use folder view mode AND does (did?) have icons on his desktop. If you drag an application from the menu, or a file from Dolphin, to the desktop, or right click an app in the menu and choose Add To Desktop, an Icon widget is created directly on the desktop containment, no FolderView needed. KDE 4.0 veterans will recall this was the only way to have icons on the desktop, and FolderView was introduced later so that we had all the sorting, multiple selection, layout options that were familiar from kdesktop.

right, and here was i, thinking i knew my way around KDE by now.

i've always used either folder view or the default desktop, and never noticed that it's possible to create all types of icons on a 'normal' desktop. interesting...and thanks for letting me know.

There's always something more to learn. For my own edification on the train back from the PIM sprint, I started reading through /usr/bin/startkde and cross referencing with the available documentation on its components. I finally learned what 'kcminit' does on startup - it's a program that runs an initialization function defined by some System Settings modules to apply settings on startup, such as setting the cursor theme and X dpi. The interesting thing was that not all of the modules that state they need kcminit's help at startup actually do, leading to unnecessary module loads delaying login. That will be fixed for 12.2... Oh by the way, the opensuse-kde team is making Stability and Polish our main themes for 12.2, this is part of that. Will -- Will Stephenson, openSUSE Board, Booster, KDE Developer SUSE LINUX GmbH, GF: Jeff Hawn, Jennifer Guild, Felix Imendörffer, HRB 21284 (AG Nürnberg) Maxfeldstraße 5 90409 Nürnberg Germany -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

On 02/12/2012 08:29 AM, Will Stephenson pecked at the keyboard and wrote:

On Sunday 12 Feb 2012 07:40:07 Ken Schneider - openSUSE wrote:

...

I did change the desktop to a grid desktop and added the icons/widgets that I could recall I was using. No clue why my original icon setup was missing including my favorite background picture.

Ok, so the griddesktop was only added after the upgrade that lost the icons? Do you have a backup of the file from before the upgrade?

Will

No I don't as I didn't expect to loose my desktop items. -- Ken Schneider SuSe since Version 5.2, June 1998 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

On 12/02/12 06:54, phanisvara das wrote:

On Sat, 11 Feb 2012 22:57:42 +0530, Ken Schneider - openSUSE wrote:

...

Just upgraded KDE from 4.7 to 4.8 and all of the icons on my desktop went missing. Is there a way to restore what I had short of recreating them manually?

did you check your desktop settings (right-click on the desktop -> folder view / desktop settings). perhaps you had it configured as "folder view" previously, and somehow it turned into "default desktop" during the upgrade. if that's the case, changing this setting back to "folder view" should return your icons.

For what it's worth, I've had exactly that experience with three separate installs of oS 12.1 upgraded from KDE 4.7 to 4.8. The three machines are a 64-bit desktop, a 32-bit laptop (Dell XPS M1530) and a 32-bit netbook (ASUS EeePC 1015PEM). In each case I'd been using a locally-configured Folder View as the default desktop in KDE4.7, but the upgrade(s) to 4.8 resulted in default to the basic "Desktop" view sans the expected Folder View icons. Manual selection of Folder View then restored the screen to what I'd had before, icons and all; so the preferred configurations had been preserved though not the selection of destop. Beyond that, some of my local preferences for Dolphin were also lost in the upgrade, and had to be restored manually. And beyond that again, I've had oddities with phonon backends in KDE4.8. In 4.7 I'd been using GStreamer as the preferred phonon backend, and it had worked well in all regards. In 4.8, however, either Amarok won't play MP3s or Digikam (or Gwenview) won't play an MP3 soundtrack in Advanced Slideshow unless I use VLC as the phonon backend. That is, in KDE4.8 neither the GStreamer nor the Xine backends will give me both Amarok and the slideshow soundtrack (.mp3), yet all three backends worked well in 4.7 (and system sounds work in 4.8 with any of the three backends). If I said I could begin to suggest reasons for this behaviour I'd be lying, but because it happens identically on three quite different machines, hardware seems much less likely to be the culprit than something in the software combination KDE4.8/Amarok/Digikam etc/phonon backends. Robin K (from the Antipodes) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

On 02/11/2012 12:57 PM, phanisvara das pecked at the keyboard and wrote:

On Sat, 11 Feb 2012 22:57:42 +0530, Ken Schneider - openSUSE wrote:

...

And why the F$%& can't the KDE dev's figure out a way to migrate settings from one version to the next. Absolute childish bull-shit as far as I am concerned.

you're absolutely right. you should demand your money back.

I did and got a full refund of what I paid. :-) -- Ken Schneider SuSe since Version 5.2, June 1998 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

On 02/11/2012 01:36 PM, phanisvara das pecked at the keyboard and wrote:

On Sat, 11 Feb 2012 23:36:36 +0530, Ken Schneider - openSUSE wrote:

...

On 02/11/2012 12:57 PM, phanisvara das pecked at the keyboard and wrote:

...

On Sat, 11 Feb 2012 22:57:42 +0530, Ken Schneider - openSUSE wrote:

...

And why the F$%& can't the KDE dev's figure out a way to migrate settings from one version to the next. Absolute childish bull-shit as far as I am concerned.

you're absolutely right. you should demand your money back.

I did and got a full refund of what I paid. :-)

glad to hear it. and what about the icons, did you get those back, too?

Nope, it seems they all escaped in the ruckus and I can't afford to hire a posse to hunt them down. :-) -- Ken Schneider SuSe since Version 5.2, June 1998 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org