How do I zoom out of an activity with the current version of trunk? The desktop cashew just gives me the choices "Add Widgets", "Desktop Settings", "Lock Widgets" and "Hide Dashboard".

furanku wrote:How do I zoom out of an activity with the current version of trunk? The desktop cashew just gives me the choices "Add Widgets", "Desktop Settings", "Lock Widgets" and "Hide Dashboard".

sometimes instead of the dashboard , the zoom out option appears.

but you can also ctrl + mouse wheel to zoom out

Whew! That was a rough ride ... :-O

I didn't found the button to link activities to desktops, but the whole activity view was very unresponsive, like the system beeing under 100% load, the buttons below the activities showed up unreproducible in strange order, I unintentionally created two new acivities and had difficulties to get back to my normal desktop.

furanku wrote:Whew! That was a rough ride ... :-O

I didn't found the button to link activities to desktops, but the whole activity view was very unresponsive, like the system beeing under 100% load, the buttons below the activities showed up unreproducible in strange order, I unintentionally created two new acivities and had difficulties to get back to my normal desktop.

After a few weeks of trying I have the similar experience as furanku

And as others have reported I see Activities growing and spawning. Earlier today I had 12! And I dont know why! I have no idea where they came from. And on zoom out the system is slow deleting them takes forever!

Although I have read up on whatever I can find, I have to say that overall I dont understand what an 'Activity' is supposed to do and how I can relate it to my work.

Back in the days of 3.5...
I used to have 6 Desktops, each with a different background to identify it. As strange as it may seem those Desktops worked fantastically well to hold my different "Activities". Typically I have 2 or 3 apps on each desktop, and (amazingly!) I could switch at an instant with a mouse click or a hotkey.

Sadly those happy days are gone it seems.

Please... does anybody know how / where I can find information to help me make sense of KDE Activities and Desktops? Really... you can leave out the bells and whistles - I'd be quite happy if I could just put a different background on each Desktop again!

Or maybe tell me how to run KDE 3.5 on Fedora 10

l.

OK
So I took a deep breath and went back in. And I almost have it... almost

I reinstalled kde anyway just in case. this is 4.2.1-fc10

I put this in $KDEHOME/share/config/plasmarc

Code: Select all

[General]
perVirtualDesktopViews=true

(there seem to various conflicting reports as to whether it does anything or not)

deleted all but 1 desktop

restarted plasma

Then I added 5 Activities, giving of these a different wallpaper.
Then add an Activity Widget to the bottom panel and I can switch between them!
Wonderful. Almost.

The main problem is that all the apps show in the taskmanager in every activity/desktop so there isnt any point. And I cant figure any way to make the applications appear in a single activity / desktop.

Zooming out into the ZUI... If I right click on the activity/desktops:
Some of them have the option to 'Remove this desktop'
others have the option to 'Remove this Activity'

If I now add desktops they have no background, no right click menu. nothing.

anybody know what I need to do to make this work?

thanks if you do

l.

londoh wrote:
Back in the days of 3.5...
I used to have 6 Desktops, each with a different background to identify it. As strange as it may seem those Desktops worked fantastically well to hold my different "Activities". Typically I have 2 or 3 apps on each desktop, and (amazingly!) I could switch at an instant with a mouse click or a hotkey.

Sadly those happy days are gone it seems.

I agree entirely with these sentiments. I trust that plasma is a great thing, but what I want is what londoh describes. I really find different wallpapers for different "desktops" useful for knowing where I am.

The current state of my understanding is that Activites exist in order to group widgets. But I work with programs -- Firefox, Kompozer, Gimp and so on -- not with widgets!

joneall wrote:

londoh wrote:
Back in the days of 3.5...
I used to have 6 Desktops, each with a different background to identify it. As strange as it may seem those Desktops worked fantastically well to hold my different "Activities". Typically I have 2 or 3 apps on each desktop, and (amazingly!) I could switch at an instant with a mouse click or a hotkey.

Sadly those happy days are gone it seems.

I agree entirely with these sentiments. I trust that plasma is a great thing, but what I want is what londoh describes. I really find different wallpapers for different "desktops" useful for knowing where I am.

The current state of my understanding is that Activites exist in order to group widgets. But I work with programs -- Firefox, Kompozer, Gimp and so on -- not with widgets!

actually , been using it with 4.2.67 for a week , and no problems here.

never have activities disappeared or appeared , nor nothing.

and switching is also very fast. only problem is kwin effects on grid and present windows that are slower now.

and i actually have 9 activities / virtual desktops.

as you can see here : http://yagami.deviantart.com/art/wonder ... -116540302

yagami wrote:
actually , been using it with 4.2.67 for a week , and no problems here.

never have activities disappeared or appeared , nor nothing.

and switching is also very fast. only problem is kwin effects on grid and present windows that are slower now.

and i actually have 9 activities / virtual desktops.

as you can see here : http://yagami.deviantart.com/art/wonder ... -116540302

Hi yagami/Joneall

Joneall - commiserations!

yagami - I'm glad to hear you can make it work for you.
I looked at your screenshot but its difficult to see whats happening.

My needs are probably quite simple. I just want to get a different background on a number of desktops and group my applications within those desktop/activities
Can you help me by explaining howto do this?

londoh wrote:
Joneall - commiserations!

Thank you. Maybe I will do better with a more advanced version of KDE. I'm using what is available under Kubuntu 9.04 (2.6.28-11).

How do I find out the version of KDE i am running? If I look at "About KDE" in the help tab of an application, I see KDE4.2.1. Is that correct?

Thanks.

@joneall:

Yes, that is exactly what you need to look at when you are running KDE.

londoh wrote:

yagami wrote:
actually , been using it with 4.2.67 for a week , and no problems here.

never have activities disappeared or appeared , nor nothing.

and switching is also very fast. only problem is kwin effects on grid and present windows that are slower now.

and i actually have 9 activities / virtual desktops.

as you can see here : http://yagami.deviantart.com/art/wonder ... -116540302

Hi yagami/Joneall

Joneall - commiserations!

yagami - I'm glad to hear you can make it work for you.
I looked at your screenshot but its difficult to see whats happening.

My needs are probably quite simple. I just want to get a different background on a number of desktops and group my applications within those desktop/activities
Can you help me by explaining howto do this?

about the screenshot , if you click download , you will get the full sized image. maybe that helps.

remember this is in 4.2.67 , not 4.2.1

what i did was , before starting i set up the same number of activities and virtual desktops

then i zoomed out and after a while ( plasma zoom out is very very slow ) a window appeared that had a checkbox for linking plasma actitvities with virtual desktops.

i clicked on it. at first , it lost all the names of my activities. but that was it. i then renamed all activities again ,and has been stable so far.

tip , if you want to change the order of the activities , or specify which one on a specific virtual desktop , just zoom out on the virtual desktop , and zoom in on the activity you want.

good luck

I've tried this experimental feature on Kubuntu 8.10 with KDE 4.2, because I would really like to see it working. However, I have two displays, and according to the plasma website every display screen must have its own activity. Contrarily, my virtual desktops span both displays. You may have to link activities somehow to get this working. I got a lot of activities spawning, and some strange combinations where my larger screen would show an activity of the smaller one and so on... But two thumbs up, once this works, it would be great!

einar wrote:Now, edit the file $KDEHOME/share/config/plasmarc ($KDEHOME is .kde on Kubuntu 8.10+, .kde4 on openSUSE. I don't know about other distros). Inside, locate the [General] section. There, write

Code: Select all

perVirtualDesktopViews=true

Or, use this command on a shell

Code: Select all

% kwriteconfig --file plasmarc --group General --key perVirtualDesktopView --type bool true


And let KDE figure out where to find the file and where to put the setting

Cheers,
_

anda_skoa wrote:

einar wrote:

Code: Select all

% kwriteconfig --file plasmarc --group General --key perVirtualDesktopView --type bool true

And let KDE figure out where to find the file and where to put the setting

I have two questions:

• Why is this information not more readily available (prominently displayed)?
• Should it be this difficult to do? I mean, shouldn't "Desktop Settings" just allow you to specify that this wall paper is for all desktops and if you want per-desktop wallpaper, then click here and you'll get perVirtualDesktopView set to "true"? It used to work this way, and I do not see why it should be made so much harder to do now.

Not sure what you mean, but the setting can now be found in System Settings -> Workspace Appearance and Behavior -> Workspace Behavior -> (Virtual Desktops ->) Different widgets for each desktop.