Selected 'new activity' and screwed everything up!

[DoYouKubuntu]

I think my mom's ghost must be playing games right now. For the first time since [finally] upgrading to 12.04 on one laptop, i decided to click 'new activity' and then 'activities.' I clicked on a blue activity from the selection that appeared, and the INSTANT I clicked on it my wallpaper changed. On 8 of my 9 desktops, the wallpaper changed to Ariya; on the other one, it changed to Horos. WTF? I had my desktops finely tuned, each with a different image for its wallpaper. What happened?

Also, and I know this has to be due to a system color setting, but since I'd never chosen 'activities' before I'd never seen it until now, when I had the activities choices open, there was no text visible on any of its buttons. I'm not sure I'm making this at all clear, but let me know if I can clarify it somehow. Anyway, it was a crap-shoot picking which button to click; I chose what I hoped would be 'cancel' but I really don't know for sure.

So what exactly did I cause to happen by clicking on the blue activity?

I now have this running: /usr/bin/kactivitymanagerd. I killed it off but that didn't seem to do anything. I logged out and back in, and it's running again.

How do I get things back the way they were? And whatever that activity thingy is for...well, whatever. How do I make it go away? Remember that there's no readable text on any of the buttons.

[Rog131]

KDE Activities

About Activities

The Mystery of KDE Activities : http://www.datamation.com/open-sourc...ivities-1.html

Activities are a super-set of Virtual Desktops. They don't replace Virtual Desktops -- in fact, each Activity can have its own set of Virtual Desktops if you choose. Instead, Activities are alternative desktops, each of which can have its own wallpaper, icons, and widgets...

KDE UserBase: http://userbase.kde.org/Plasma -> http://userbase.kde.org/Plasma#Activities

Kde profiles for home, work movie watching etc : http://askubuntu.com/questions/28467...e-watching-etc

Q&A

So what exactly did I cause to happen by clicking on the blue activity?

You selected a new (empty) activity which have its own wallpaper, icons, and widgets...



As default /1/ there are two:

- Desktop
- New (empty)

Back to the Desktop Activity - click the other button (Desktop).

Making new activities: create activity...




Notes

1. I'm writing this with the 13.04 / KDE 4.10

[DoYouKubuntu]

Thank you very much for the input, Rog131. However, my choices don't match yours--there is no 'desktop' choice.

I'm sure everything is being controlled from within my ~/.kde/share/config directory--can anyone point me to a CLI method of getting rid of (turning off...making it go away...putting things back the way they were...) activities? I see various things in various config files but after experimenting I haven't gotten anywhere.

[NickStone]

I found this in the KDE help pages on my pc, hope it helps you. I'm using KDE 4.10.2 so it might be a bit different to your version. But hopefully it will work for you.

To delete an activity, press the Stop Activity button on “Activities” bar (press Alt+D then Alt+A to open this bar) then click the red 'X' (or press Alt+D then Alt+R) and confirm the deletion.

[claydoh]

plasma-desktop-appletsrc is the main config file with Activity info, as well as activitymanagerrc & activitymanager-pluginsrc.

It may be wise to remove all plasma*rc files, which will lead you to a bone stock Kubuntu desktop layout.

Having noticed that we are in the 12.04 section , there will be differences in the look and feel of the Activity setup options if you are running the stock KDE 4.8x in Precise, and perhaps the configuration file names. But overall it should be similar.

[DoYouKubuntu]

Well, I 'fixed' it, but not elegantly. I tried just about everything in this thread, but never got back what I wanted, and still had /usr/bin/kactivitymanagerd running regardless of anything I did. (I uninstalled what I could via Synaptic--that took away the 'add new activity' [or whatever it said] cashew at the top of my screen, but did nothing to stop /usr/bin/kactivitymanagerd from running.) So...I removed /usr/bin/kactivitymanagerd, manually reset each desktop's wallpaper, and things now look/act basically like they did before.