Please help. My desktop seems to be the plasma dashboard. How do I kill it?

I don't mind the plasma dashboard, as long as it only pops up when I click on the icon. I hate the stupid thing being my desktop. I want only icons on the desktop. How do I fix this?

Thanks.

It's the other way round - the dashboard shows your desktop. If you want to separate the dashboard from your desktop, see this howto or wait for KDE 4.3 where there's a GUI setting for this.

As for icons, right click on desktop -> Appearance Settings -> Choose "Folder View" as Desktop type. See this blog post for more information.

Thanks. I have icons on the desktop, but the plasma dashboard covers them. The only way around this is to remove all widgets from the dashboard (making it completely useless).

I tried the tips from the page mentioned above, but they didn't work. Possibly because there was no "ViewIds" entry added in plasmarc for the new activity (I used the original one instead with no success).

Any other suggestions?

Nope, then you'll have to wait for KDE 4.3 as mentioned (or try if you can't wait, try the RCs - RC2 was just released today. )

i assume you want the icons contained in /home/<username>/Desktop to show on your desktop, nothing else. if that's correct, i'd suggest to open a terminal window, type "kquitapp plasma-desktop"

then "cd /home/<username>/.kde4/share/config/"

and run "rm plasma*"

that will delete all your present plasma-settings, and when you type "plasma-desktop & disown" in the terminal, the standard KDE 4 desktop should appear.

right-click on the desktop somewhere, choose "desktop settings", and in the first option menu choose "folder view," which should show you all the icons in your desktop folder, without any widgets & stuff.

important: if you want to be able to recover your previous desktop settings, you'll have to back up your plasma settings first:

create a folder somewhere, like "mkdir /home/<username>/plasma-backup", then "cp /home/<username>/.kde4/share/config/plasma* /home/<username>/plasma-backup/", which should copy all plasma related config. files to your backup directory.

if you want to restore your previous desktop after trying my suggeston, quitt plasma the same way as above, then "cp /home/<username>/plasma-backup/* /home/<username>/.kde4/share/config/" and restart plasma.

then you can change desktop settings like wallpaper or background color, and as long as you don't add any widgets, you sholdn't see anything but your icons.