plasma "desktop activity" never-never land.....
 

i'm installing slack 13.1 on a friend's machine, and ran into what i would not call a bug, but more of an oversight.

when selecting a desktop activity type, i must have definitely clicked the wrong item. i got a group of icons in the middle of the screen corresponding to the categories in the KDE menu. it worked ok, you could click on a category and get a group of icons for the apps, and click on the app to launch it. no problem there.... but you could not revert to a regular desktop.... at all.... no amount of right clicking would bring up the popup window i used to get there, and the plasma jellybean at the corner of the screen was gone. the plasma jellybean on the panel at the bottom brought up a panel menu, but never could get back to the desktop activity selection menu. the only way to get back to square one, was to delete the .kde subdirectory in the user's root directory.

Yeah. The Search and Launch Containment activity blew my desktop all to hell the one time I attempted it.

When in the Activity... Right click and choose "Configure search and Launch" (or ALT+D, ALT+S).
Choose "Activity" from the left menu and change the "Type:" to "Desktop"

that was exactly the problem though, the right click never brought up the popup menu... i tried the alt keys too... once you get it into that mode, you can't change it. like having a town square with one way streets leading into it, but none lead out.... as they say in Maine "ya caint get theyah frum heeyah..."

for some reason it reminded me of microsoft "Bob", the desktop with no way out.....

I did get out of it when it happened to me, but that was last spring and I'll be damned if I remember how.

the way i got out of it was to log out and as root delete the user's .kde subdirectory.... unlike microsoft Bob, where you had to reinstall win 95 to get rid of it....

I'm using KDE 4.4.3 and what I did to get back to the default desktop was:

1. open an x-term window and close plasma by typing: kquitapp plasma-desktop
2. delete .kde/share/config/plasma-desktop-appletsrc
3. restart it by typing plasma-desktop

This worked for me.

tnx that's going in my notebook right away... i'm sure i'll see it again

i guess i should have paid more attention to the ominous sounding word "containment" before selecting that feature.....