8.10b - first impression and questions

[Myriam Schweingruber]

Hi Billie,

On Tue, Oct 7, 2008 at 2:52 AM, Billie Walsh <bilwalsh at swbell.net> wrote:
> Decided that I might give 8.10 a try and see just what it's all about.
> Loaded it on a separate hard drive. Looks nice and works my poor little
> eMachine quite well. No major hiccups so far.
>
> THEN, there's this big ugly box on my desktop that says "Desktop". How
> can you get rid of that thing? I clicked on the closing button and the
> main desktop went away for a second and when it came back it was still
> there and something stupid was covering my task bar.

You just had a plasma crash. Try again to remove the "Folder view"
widget, it might work the second time. I managed to disable it without
problems, but plasma is sometimes a bit bitchy :) (remember this is
beta! ) And that "something stupid" are the widgets which appear on
the top left by default. Just drag them away, this only happens when
plasma crashes.
One small suggestion: if you use a panel on top, avoid using it full
lenght, so you have a small space to drag widgets easily. KDE 4 is
currently configured to work with a panel at the bottom. You will also
have to reconfigure the mouse moves for the active desktop if you want
to use it, as "pushing top left" is used for a 3D functionality.

...
> Just about everywhere you click it wants to add even more junk.

But you don't have to :) Some people want their desktop clustered
(remember Win screenshots with "everything" on the desktop?). Left
click does nothing, right click of course opens a context window where
you "can" choose things. Just don't do right clicks :)

As for now you can configure almost everything in KDE 4.1.2. It works
like a charm on my old machine (Pentium IV with 1 Gb RAM). (except for
Kontact, but that is another story...)

Greets

Myriam

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