Missing panel

[pwabrahams]

A couple of times I've had the following problem: one of the programs I'm running is hung, and killing it doesn't restore the system to an acceptable state. So I log out and log back in again. When I come back, the desktop is missing its panel at the bottom of the screen, which makes it very difficult to work with. Among other things,
that makes it impossible to do anything from the K menu. So how can I restore the panel under those circumstances? And why might have it gone missing in the first place?

[rfakhrai]

Re: Missing panel

Yes, we've got to get to the bottom of why this is happening in the first place. Some questions that might help us are:

1) What program is it that hangs? If killing it doesn't "restore the system to an acceptable state" I'm guessing it's something big that's hanging.

2) Did you upgrade from 10.04 to 10.10 or was it a clean install? If so, how long after you've started using 10.10 has this problem started?

As for a temporary workaround, I don't know how you can restore the lost panel, per se, but you can create a new panel and add a K menu to it. But hopefully we can resolve your issue so this isn't necessary.

[pwabrahams]

Re: Missing panel

Yes, we've got to get to the bottom of why this is happening in the first place. Some questions that might help us are:

1) What program is it that hangs? If killing it doesn't "restore the system to an acceptable state" I'm guessing it's something big that's hanging.

Until today I only saw the problem with skype hanging. I did a killall on it before logging out. But today I encountered it with, of all things, kmail. I could read my mail all right, but kmail would hang if I tried to send anything. I'm not going to worry about that any more since a system restart restored kmail to good health, and I'll probably never see that particular manifestation of the no-panel problem again.

2) Did you upgrade from 10.04 to 10.10 or was it a clean install? If so, how long after you've started using 10.10 has this problem started?

The system that works properly was a clean install. The one that doesn't was an upgrade from 10.04, which itself was part of a series of upgrades. Perhaps if I replaced that by a clean install I'd bypass this problem, but that would be extremely disruptive. Come to think of it, I wonder how safe it would be to delete the dotfiles for plasma and let them be regenerated. But I don't know which ones I should delete if I go that way, and that would still leave me with a lot of reconfiguring to do. Perhaps just removing the right dotfile would avoid most of that hassle -- if I knew which one it is.

[The Liquidator]

Re: Missing panel

As your issue covers more than plasma I would go a bit deeper if I were you.

A half -way house would be to rename the following hidden folder (say by putting a .old suffix after it)

/home/.kde/share/config

Then reboot

That will present you with a clean desktop for you to reconfigure. When you launch a kde-centric app, it will be as if you have run it for the first time. You won't have moved any kmail data (which should be in the apps folder) so when you run kmail just set it up again and off you go. This may well sort out your problem with that program.

HTH

[Pillage Idiot]

Re: Missing panel

The first thing that I would do would be to go into the system settings/session manager and make sure that it is set to start with an empty session.
This should stop a new session from carrying in the baggage from the last problem session.
Not surprised that a killall broke it though. Using a sledge hammer to drive a tack.
You should be able to open system monitor and just kill the app that is not playing nice.