so, a bug snuck into beta 2. If you’ve never switched activities, you might not *have* a current activity, which can get you weird stuff like black screens. It’s fixed in trunk (as of a few days ago), but if you’re using the betas, go press meta-tab (the global shortcut for cycling through activities) to avoid this bug :)
Also, although the beta1 activity-creation bug was fixed, it gave some people a lot of useless activities that can’t be automagically cleaned up. If you don’t want to delete them all manually, here’s how to wipe out all your plasma and activity config:
1. log out of kde
2. log into a terminal
3. remove plasma-desktop-appletsrc and activitymanagerrc from ~/.kde4/share/config/ (might be .kde/ instead of .kde4/ on some distros)
4. log back into kde
5. do the meta-tab thing again if you’re on beta 2
remember: that will delete *all* your plasma config, both desktop and panels. you might want to back up the files first, in case you change your mind.
[edit] oh, one more note; if you’re using multiple screens or PVD, the migration from 4.4 to 4.5beta will make each containment a separate activity. so, if you had 4 virtual desktops and PVD turned on, you’ll have four activities, *each* with four containments. this might not be what you wanted. I had intended to add some code to try and create fewer activities during migration, but didn’t have time. it might still make it into 4.5; we’ll see.
ChaniBlog 
wow yes :) I hope all the strange activities bugs get fixed. I am currently running trunk with PVD and 4 desktops should that correspond to 4 activities? I was getting 3, but that was fixed now I get 2.
Does that mean 2 physical screens(left, right lcd) means 2 activities (left and right) regardless of the number of (4) virtual desktops?
when you switch, yes. once you’ve started plasma 4.5beta/trunk then you can delete the extra activities and they won’t come back.
Few bugs I would like to mention, I have not added these to bko yet.
So 2 physical screens 2 activities, but it allows me to delete one of them, which means there is no activity on the second screen. I guess this should not happen? The effects of deleting an activity on PVM:
When I deleted one of the activity and opened add widgets and added a new widget say ‘system-monitor CPU’ the widget appears on both the screens :) (happens for all widgets of atleast most of them that I have tired)
Another would be to name the activity by default from ‘unnamed’ to ‘left’ ‘right’, ‘top’, ‘bottom’ or something more sensible because the default activity name does not give any indication of which physical screen it is associated with. Start and stop the activity is not the ideal way to find out which screen is mapped to which activity.
Another bug Is the activity panel shows up over the panel when the panel is located at the top of the screen.
thanks for listening :)
nonono, *each* activity has a containment (aka widget group, what *used* to be called an activity) for *each* screen. so in the first activity, one screen will have your old widgets and the other will have a new desktop with default wallpaper; on the second activity, there’ll be one screen with your *other* set of widgets and the other screen will have a new desktop.
activities are no longer a single-screen thing; each activity covers all your screens, so changing it changes everything.
…
you got a widget to appear on two screens at once? that *really* shouldn’t be possible. what version are you using? beta1, beta2 or trunk?
and.. the activity manager shouldn’t be showing up at the top of the screen, that’s a bug. but aaron’s trying to solve that already :)
oh right, you said you were using trunk. that reallyreally shouldn’t happen. it should not be at all possible. :/
Just a note – instead of deleting plasma-desktop-appletsrs, you can just delete the lines beginning with activityID.
no; that would leave you with a bunch of orphans, and then plasma would helpfully turn them into new activities next time it starts.
Hi Chani. I just installed beta 2 and I’m having a bit of a problem at getting to grips with the new concepts. Let me give you a bit bit of context. I used to have 6 Virtual Desktops (VD) Each of which with a different activity. To switch activities I used the expose effect. This worked great as each activity/VD really corresponded to a different real life activity. I can’t seem to be able to reproduce this with beta2 as I need an extra mechanism to switch activities. Could you comment on the new behaviour? Are there any plans for real activity/VD integration/mapping? Thanks a lot.
activities and virtual desktops are separate now; you can still have different widgets on different desktops, though, so you have all the features of 4.4 still. :) see https://chani.wordpress.com/2010/05/24/activities-in-4-5/ and https://chani.wordpress.com/2010/02/20/the-limits-of-virtual-desktops/
are these related ?
http://kde.pastey.net/137613 http://kde.pastey.net/137614
uhh, they look the same to me… but, my blog is not a bug database, guys :)
I have created a bug on bko: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=238638
[…] Kubuntu PPA and are wondering why your widgets disappear every time you login, it’s because beta 2 has a bug where it gets really confused about which activity you are using – use meta-tab (windows-tab) to switch between them and you should eventually find what […]