Hi,

I just installed the OpenSuSE 11.3 release and the panel is not auto-hiding like it used to. I would change it, but this new plasma stuff is using black lettering on a black background. I think this is less than clever. I am able to right click the right place to get "panel settings" and I can guess that the wrench brings up the menu I want, but I cannot read the menu. Black on black, you know.

So: A) How can I make this thing readable, and B) how can I get the auto hiding behavior restored like I had it in OpenSuSE 11.2? Thank you.

Oh, by the way, I have a chameleon calculator running with only some of the digits on the face actually visible. This plasma stuff made the whole thing almost entirely invisible. I can click buttons, but I cannot see any results. It's really cool and really useless. Thanks!

Did you by any chance do any upgrade installation of openSUSE 11.3? Or are you using a very dark desktop background?

If you did an upgrade installation, try logging out of KDE and removing /var/tmp/kdecache-$USER/

If that isn't the case, did you change the Plasma theme?

I've noticed that if you use Air in new 11.3 installs but with existing settings the theme falls back to Oxygen. To work around the issue, open systemsettings, select "Workspace Appearance" then "Theme" then "Air". Click apply and you'll get something readable.

a) yes, this was an upgrade. I'll log out as soon as I figure out
how to update the hardware clock. It seems to be 10 days behind
and fsck doesn't like that. I set the date and did "init 5"
to get past it.

b) In a few hours I'll be back in a reboot. Leaving momentarily.

c) "if you use Air"?? What's "air"? Isn't oxygen part of what
makes up air? Plasma isn't. It is a strange molecular state
usually caused by very extreme temperatures. (I'm being
deliberately obtuse because, in fact, I don't know what these
are. I've never consciously set any "themes".)

[[time passes]] THANK YOU!! I found the "Air openSUSE" under
Style -- System Settings and lo the background is grey. Whew!!

einar wrote:I've noticed that if you use Air in new 11.3 installs but with existing settings the theme falls back to Oxygen. To work around the issue, open systemsettings, select "Workspace Appearance" then "Theme" then "Air". Click apply and you'll get something readable.

I don't quite understand that; Oxygen is listed as the widget style under Applications and Air is listed under Workspace.

Incidentally, I have had no problems; everything on my desktop has carried over without any problems.

john_hudson wrote:I don't quite understand that; Oxygen is listed as the widget style under Applications and Air is listed under Workspace.

The widget style, window decorator, and workspace style are all independent, even though there are some themes for each that have the same name.

The following is based on a guess about the way it works. I "leapfrog update" releases. That is, I have the current release installed and the previous release, both. Thus, if an install is DOA, I go back to the previous release. That means I upgraded from 11.1 to 11.3 with 11.2 hidden away where I don't let the installation know about it. (I've been bitten enough times that I've got bite marks on bite marks.) So I was using KDE 3.5 on SuSE 11.1 because only now is KDE 4.x getting to be mostly usable. There are still too many new behaviors enabled by default. My guess is that KDE 3.5 did not have themes, so the panel background was undefined and undefined meant black. That also happens to be (almost) the color of the fonts used. With many apps defaulting to an invisible background and the panel to black-on-black, the hapless user is helpless, too. Very poor choicing in the defaulting department. The KDE Panel _is_ too hard to manage.

Undefined should mean that the default theme gets used... Please open Konsole, and run the following commands:

Code: Select all

killall -9 plasma-desktop
rm /var/tmp/kdecache-$USER/plasma*
rm $(kde4-config --localprefix)/share/config/plasma*
kbuildsycoca4 --noincremental
plasma-desktop &

Please ignore the output from the above commands, especially the final two. This should be executed as your normal user.