Panel position is everything: Getting your KDE4 Panel in the right place.

KDE 4.1.2 Has an interesting panel. It seems to have a way of popping up in a random place on a random screen(if you run dual screen like I do).

When I fired up my new shiny KDE4 Desktop for the first time, my panel was stuck on my old 17" CRT, with no drag-n-drop way to get it to the other side. And yes I did click on the cashew and try everything until I was blue.

So without further a due:

run :
kdesu kwrite /home//.kde4/share/config/plasma-appletsrc

The applets Configuration file

This configuration file contains the settings of all your plasma applets. Containments are: the desktop and the panel. You can add plasmoids(widgets) to it.

[Containments][1]
..
plugin=desktop

[Containments][1][Applets][23]
..
plugin=folderview

This means that folderview is nested in containment 1, the desktop.

Moving the panel

Now find your panel. It looks like this:
[Containments][26]
formfactor=2
geometry=0,-44,1980,38
immutability=1
location=4
plugin=panel
screen=0
zvalue=150
The settings above puts my panel at the bottom of my second screen, which is really my main screen. Changing the screen value should change where your panel is located. location is which edge of the screen your panel sticks to.

Here comes the tricky part. You've done your editing and you want to make your changes permanent. Saving the file and restarting X will not work. When plasma exits it will repopulate the file with it's current settings. We need to close plasma to save the settings.

Open a konsole and run the following command:
kquitapp plasma

Now save your plasma-appletsrc file and then run plasma from the konsole window. Your new settings should be there now.

Small tip... I had trouble working in that file... so I deleted everything except my desktop and my panel... there aren't that many widgets in this version of KDE, so it's no problem to just add them again.

I would like to hear about your experiences with the panel and the panel settings, and what works and doesn't. I can't exaclty remember how I got it right....

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