I was just wondering: is it possible to have to panels on top of/next to eachother in KDE 4.2? In my case, two at the bottom with one being set to auto-hide?

As far as I can tell, there is no easy way of determining where you want an extra panel to be located. The default is one at the bottom. If you add a second one, it's added to the top. A third one is automatically at the left-hand side. And a fourth on the right hand side.

This is what I am trying to accomplish:

I want one at the bottom with only the pager, task-manager, and the systray. I have that one. I want one at the top with Kickoff/lancelot, the Xbar, one or two quick-access plasmoids, the clock and the trashcan. I have that one too. Those are set up the way I want them.

However, I would like one atop of the bottom one to be used as a sort-of quicklauncher field (only to be shown as the pointer is on top of it, AKA autohide). I could put a quicklauncher on either of the bars I already have but that would use unneccessary screen-estate and I use the left and right-hand sides of my monitor for other purposes already (besides, the quicklauncher applet in the Suse 4.2 binaries seems to be broken so I would use either ordinary icons or klicker (http://kde-look.org/content/show.php/kl ... tent=99554) plasmoids.

Any ideas?

you can do it you go into panel setting>more settings from there you tell the panel to go left, center or right and you also resize them from panel settings
then to add another panel and yes it will put it at the top but you can move that panel also from panel settings to the bottom and resize it
there my screen shot of my panels at the bottom then i have 1 at the top that auto hides

Havoc wrote:you can do it you go into panel setting>more settings from there you tell the panel to go left, center or right and you also resize them from panel settings

So I can, but that only affects the alignment of the panel on the side it's already on.
What I mean is that if I have a small panel with only the systray (for example) on the bottom of my screen, the alignment buttons only allow me to set whether it should be left, right or centered at the bottom. It doesn't allow me to move the panel to the top of the screen.

If my description was less-than-helpful, this image will tell you (hopefully) what I want to accomplish and as far as I can tell, the more settings->alignment won't let me do that. I get a smallish panel (after resizing it) on the left on the screen, and all the alignment buttons let me to is to decide whether I want the panel starting from the top going down, starting at the bottom going up, or centered going up and down. That's it.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3394/329 ... 885e_o.png

A panel must be at a screen edge, you can't have a floating panel. I am not sure how a floating auto-hiding panel would work, moving your mouse over a random point on the screen would cause it to appear. However, what you can do is have an always visible panel and an auto-hiding panel of the same size (or different sizes) in the same place (or at least overlapping), so that when you put your mouse at the bottom of the screen the auto-hiding panel will cover the normal panel. I think that is pretty close to what.

Now in principle having a panel that can change its size and/or shape when you do something, allowing it to expand out like you said, should be possible with plasma. But it doesn't exist yet.

TheBlackCat wrote:A panel must be at a screen edge, you can't have a floating panel.

[snip]

Now in principle having a panel that can change its size and/or shape when you do something, allowing it to expand out like you said, should be possible with plasma. But it doesn't exist yet.

Ah. Okay. Not the answer I was hoping for, but hey: that's life. Thanks! Now I won't try to do something that, for now at least, isn't possible.