Hi all

Short intro: I maintain lernstick (http://www.imedias.ch/lernstick), a distribution for Swiss schools based on Debian Live. While the current version is still based on Debian Lenny (with KDE-3.5), work on the next version based on Debian Squeeze (with KDE-4.4) has already begun.

While KDE 4 has much eye-candy, there are several new problems. One of them is the horizontal size of kickoff. In KDE 3 it was easy to specify that kicker should always use 100% of the screen width. Now in KDE 4 we can not find a way to specify the same behavior. It looks like kickoff only allows fixed size values. This leads to very ugly results when a user was working on a computer with a small screen and later continues his/her work on a computer with a larger screen. In this case kickoff only uses a fraction of the current screen width (the size of the previous, smaller screen).

We need a way to configure kickoff so that it always uses a given percentage of the screen width (or just the full screen width as a simple short-term solution). Is there any way to do this?

Thanks for any hints/suggestions and many greetings from snowy Switzerland

Ronny Standtke

By "Kickoff" do you mean the menu or the panel (called "Kicker" in KDE3)?
I'm not sure if you would want the Kickoff menu to be maximized horizontally.
On the other hand, there should be a way to force the panel to maximize horizontally when the screen resolution is different; however I am not in a very good position to search for options.

Assuming you are referring to the panel, I'd recommend looking at for a workaround/solution to this viewtopic.php?f=66&t=91564&p=179103#p179237

airdrik wrote:By "Kickoff" do you mean the menu or the panel (called "Kicker" in KDE3)?

Oh, sorry for the confusion. Yes, I mean the panel.

bcooksley wrote:Assuming you are referring to the panel, I'd recommend looking at for a workaround/solution to this viewtopic.php?f=66&t=91564&p=179103#p179237

Thank you very much for this link. There is a big problem with the proposed workarounds:
Our users are free to customize their desktop settings as they wish. When we enforce "fit to width" by config file deletion or a workaround script, we disable the customization of the panel...

Any other idea/solution? If not, should I file a bugreport or is this limitation already known and a solution in the works?

The Javascript solution I pointed to doesn't disable customisation of the panel, except for it's width. I do suggest filing a bug however.

bcooksley wrote:The Javascript solution I pointed to doesn't disable customisation of the panel, except for it's width.

OK, I found out that the following script maximizes the panel:

Code: Select all

for (var i = 0; i < panelIds.length; ++i) {
        var panel = panelById(panelIds[i]);
        panel.length = screenGeometry(panel.screen).width;
}

I read
http://techbase.kde.org/KDE_System_Admi ... pScripting
and noticed that I can run this script:
1) on first run
2) on update
3) interactively
but how can the script be run automatically at every login?

It cannot be at the moment. As a workaround, specify your script as an "update" script, and then use kwriteconfig to overwrite the content of the [Updates] group in the plasma-desktop-appletsrc file.

Code: Select all

kwriteconfig --file plasma-desktop-appletsrc --group Updates --key performed "<value goes here>"

Make sure to change <value goes here> as needed, and have this run as part of the login process that happens prior to KDE starting.

Thank you for the idea for a workaround. Unfortunately, I did not manage to make it work.

bcooksley wrote:As a workaround, specify your script as an "update" script

How do I do this exactly? I just tried on Ubuntu 10.10 and put the four lines for-loop above into this file
/usr/share/kde4/apps/plasma-desktop/updates/panel_to_screen_width.js

bcooksley wrote:Make sure to change <value goes here> as needed

What value makes sense? I tried with "panel_to_screen_width" but it did not work...

Check the value of that file prior to adding the update file, then check it afterward and compare. You should set it back to what it was originally, which will cause Plasma to re-run the update.

That location is correct I believe for update scripts to be added to.

bcooksley wrote:

Code: Select all

kwriteconfig --file plasma-desktop-appletsrc --group Updates --key performed "<value goes here>"

There was a typo:
s/plasma-desktop-appletsrc/plasma-desktoprc

I saw that the "performed" key changed and included the full path of the script. But still, when I log out and change the key (I just removed the path), the panel does not get maximized when logging in again. But when I run the script interactively after the login process finished, it works perfectly.

My wild guess: It looks like the script is run too early in the login process so that the panel is just not there yet and therefore not found when the script is run. Is there any way to postpone the script until the panel is actually there?

Can you please try to reproduce the situation and tell me if it works for you?

According to a developer, the panel should maintain it's aspect ratio in KDE 4.5 and later. I suggest updating, as this will be a much cleaner fix.

bcooksley wrote:According to a developer, the panel should maintain it's aspect ratio in KDE 4.5 and later. I suggest updating, as this will be a much cleaner fix.

I would love to upgrade to 4.5 and later. Unfortunately, the lernstick distribution is based on Debian Live and the next Debian stable (Squeeze) has 4.4 and 4.[>4] will only come "some time later":
http://pkg-kde.alioth.debian.org/

KDE 4.5 can be retrieved from repos mentioned at http://qt-kde.debian.net/

bcooksley wrote:KDE 4.5 can be retrieved from repos mentioned at http://qt-kde.debian.net/

Great! Thank you very much for this hint.

I just tried it out but, unfortunately, the panel in KDE-4.5 suffers from the same issue. It automatically shrinks when you switch to a device with a small screen but never enlarges when going back to a device with a large screen...