Rescuing a messed up Plasma desktop

[Nigel Ridley]

On 10/31/2011 08:13 PM, Jonas Norlander wrote:
> 2011/10/31 Nigel Ridley<nigel at prayingforisrael.net>:
>> I just had a slight major problem: I had just closed Firefox and the window
>> turned white but did not close. The close button was unresponsive so I
>> pressed 'Alt + Ctrl + Esc' and got the 'skull and crossbones' which I then
>> moved into the [white] Firefox window and clicked - apparently Firefox
>> wasn't actually there - but the Plasma desktop was! I killed the Plasma
>> Desktop and no matter what I tried - logout; reboot; cold reboot - the
>> desktop wouldn't load - just a black screen :-(
>> So I did a 'Alt + Ctrl + Delete' and got the 'Leave' options; logged out and
>> then a 'Alt + Ctrl + F1' to get to TTY1; logged in and then 'mv .kde kdeOLD'
>> - logged out, 'Alt + Ctrl + F7' and logged into a brand new Plasma desktop
>> :-)
>> I then spent half an hour getting my dektop the way I like it, then I copied
>> my new .kde to another folder, renamed it .kdeGOOD and copied it back into
>> my home folder. Now if I managed to mess things up again I can just rename
>> my .kdeGOOD to .kde and everything should be good again....
>>
>> Hope this helps someone else.
>>
>> Nigel
>
> Almost every upgrade of KDE made some bad thing to my plasma desktop
> (crashes, widgets and activities messed up) so now I always delete the
> config files "rm .kde/share/config/plasma*"
>
> It's to bad it have to bee like that but I don't know any other way.
>
> / Jonas
>

This was a fresh/clean install of Oneiric.
I don't know why, after I had 'killed' the plasma desktop, it did not restart ofter a logout.
Next time I will do as Uteck suggested "F2 run command, to restart the desktop with 'plasma-desktop'"

Nigel