"Home" icon disappears after initial use on 10.04 Netbook

[nadrach]

I now have 10.04 Netbook loaded on two machines, an ASUS 900 and an Advent QC430. Both machines installed with "Search and Launch" showing 4 icons on the upper section of the page above the "Search" box, Konquerer, Kmail, System Settings and Home. The "Home" icon opened Dolphin file manager on the home directory of the relevant login. So far, so neat ... nice layout, friendly to use, even for technophobes in my circle who are warming to KDE4 at a rapid rate. In each login, Dolphin was tweaked to open as twin panel with all panels showing consistent layout, although different layouts ... icons, details ... are in use on different logins.

After a few uses, the "Home" icon abruptly vanished from the "Search and Launch" display, on an attempt to start Dolphin which failed ... this happened separately on each login on both machines. However, conjecture is that the number of usages of the icon may be a trigger, but we have no idea how many, although it is not a high number.

Is this a preprogrammed feature, or has something gone wonky with the installs? Whatever the answer, how do I get the original icon back?

I have temporarily added a folder widget set on the home directory as a get-by, but being as this is smaller and default locates at the bottom of the screen, it is much less preferable to the original installed icon.

Any suggestions?

[nadrach]

Re: "Home" icon disappears after initial use on 10.04 Netbook

OK, possibility is that, in each case, we accidentally hit the minus symbol in the corner of the icon, triggering removal. What no one can figure out is how you edit "Search and Launch" to put a widget icon into the upper section of the display. For once, my intuition about KDE design has failed. Help appreciated.

[GreyGeek]

Re: "Home" icon disappears after initial use on 10.04 Netbook

When you right-mouse in that region does a dialog pop up that has "Add Widgets"? (if your desktop is unlocked)

[nadrach]

Re: "Home" icon disappears after initial use on 10.04 Netbook

Yes, but it adds the widgets into the main screen area below, right at the bottom of the screen, not into the upper section, and I have not figured out how to move them around ... none of the expected mouse operations has the slightest effect ... also, after several attempts to move things, but not all, I got an error screen saying that plasma notebook has died unexpectedly ... with the only noticeable effect being that the widgets on the main screen get rearranged as if the page width is reduced and the display area shrunk. I sent a couple of the errors as reports.

[nadrach]

Re: "Home" icon disappears after initial use on 10.04 Netbook

OK, we may be getting somewhere ... my wife logged in, connected WiFi, then selected to start Firefox ... nothing ... called me ... at which point we found that clicking on the Firefox icon in "Search and Launch" did not start it, but added a Firefox icon to the upper part of the screen ... which is what I have been trying to do. She has no idea how she triggered this, we have not been able to reproduce it. What I did next was delete the extra icons, and that event apparently reset operations so that clicking on an icon starts the facility required.

OK, so we can edit "Search and Launch" by accident ... now ... how do we do it deliberately!

[GreyGeek]

Re: "Home" icon disappears after initial use on 10.04 Netbook

If you right mouse on the desktop somewhere a "desktop setting" option will appear. Click it.
In the dialog's left panel is "Activities". Click it.
Four kinds of "activities" will be shown in the right panel:
Newspaper
Folder
Desktop
Search and Launch.

Take your pick.

[nadrach]

Re: "Home" icon disappears after initial use on 10.04 Netbook

OK, found it ... each icon on the lower screen has a star in the top left corner ... click on that to add a similar icon to the top bar ... on the top bar each icon has a red "minus" symbol in the top left corner, click on that to remove the icon. "Simples, eh!" I have not been able to find this information on any KDE help page, yet it must count as a basic design feature of the "search and launch" page. So where was it hidden!