Is it possible to enable and disable certain desktop effects? What I want is to turn off affect to make my panels use there "disabled" style rather then there "enabled" style while still retaining functions like previews when I hover over Dolphin in the icon only task launcher. If this isn't directly possible, is there some way to simply disable the transparency panels?

If you want to change the transparency of your panels you can edit your desktop theme in System Settings. See e.g. viewtopic.php?f=67&t=96664&p=202971#p202971 - the path I provided is for the default non-transparent panel theme.

I downloaded the Volatile theme from with in Kubuntu so the location was:
/home/$USER/.kde/share/apps/desktoptheme/Volatile/

I found the svg file for the panel but can't figure out how to save the edited image to an svg file.I tried karbon, kdegraphics and I tried savign from gwenview and kolourpaint but no luck.

The application has to support vector graphics, so Gwenview and Kolourpaint are out of question I believe. Karbon sounds right but I've never used it myself. You could try Inkscape, it's powerful but fairly straightforward and saving as svg no problem.

Hans wrote:The application has to support vector graphics, so Gwenview and Kolourpaint are out of question I believe. Karbon sounds right but I've never used it myself. You could try Inkscape, it's powerful but fairly straightforward and saving as svg no problem.

Ok thanks, I used Inkscape and I edited the panel-background.svgz file. In it are 4 long rectangles that I assume represent the panel based on the screen edge it uses. I colored the bottom one solid black, and saved it. I logged out and logged back in, but it didn't change. Did I miss something?

Update: It seems the only way to get it to work is to the details tab and manually select the file.from the themes folder. :s Also, the Tragedy theme uses a grid background for the cpu and ram widget. I have established the only image in the tragedy theme folder that uses this design is plot-background.svg. I have tried to choose that file for my widget back ground but when I do, the grid doesn't show. I can't figure out why.

No one?

Have you tried clearing the cache in ~/.kde? Either kill and restart plasma -desktop or switch/revert themes after that should work.
You can also make a non-transparent panel in inkscape and put it in the widgets folder, this way with desktop effects turned on, the panel img called will be non-transparent.

Depending on how complete the Tragedy theme, if some elements needed are not present then I assume the default images are used as a stand in or substitute. You could end up with the grid image in some places not desired.

OneLine has a thread on KFN on a beautifully simple means to edit panel backgrounds using inkscape.
Carefully note the method he used.

pagoda wrote:Have you tried clearing the cache in ~/.kde?

It's /var/tmp/kdecache-${USER}/, actually.