kde pager

INSTALLING THE PAGER BINARY 

If you're running the 32-bit version of Suse 11.2, you can 
just download the new pager binary from here: 

 

Then remove your current pager from its panel, and kill 
plasma by doing "killall plasma-desktop"; this will cause 
your panel(s) to disappear. Become root and rename your 
current pager binary at: 

/usr/lib/kde4/plasma_applet_pager.so 

to something else (e.g., plasma_applet_pager.so.orig), and 
copy the new plasma_applet_pager.so into the /usr/lib/kde4/ 
directory. (The new one is a lot bigger than the original -- 
588KB vs. 92KB -- presumably because it contains debugging 
symbols.) 

Then (as yourself again) run "plasma-desktop", which will 
restore your panel(s) (I use one at the top of the screen and 
one at the bottom). I get several error messages when I 
restart plasma-desktop, but it works fine. 

Do "Add Widgets" in the panel where the pager was, select 
"Pager" from the list, and "Add Widget". Then right-click 
on the pager now in the panel, select "Pager Settings", and 
click the "Desktop name" button and "OK". The new pager will 
then show the desktop names in readable form, and the current 
desktop in reverse-video. It works great with every theme 
I've tried, except Cream (where the name of the current 
desktop is not shown in clear reverse-video). Enjoy! 

BUILDING THE PAGER FROM SOURCE 

If you want to build plasma_applet_pager.so from source 
yourself (which I think you'll need to if you're running 
64-bit Suse 11.2), here's how to do it: 

Install everything in the "Base Development" and "KDE 
Development" patterns in Yast Software Management. 

Create a directory in your account to work in, go into it, 
and run: 

svn co  

Run cmake inside the topmost directory -- "workspace" . When 
I did this cmake complained about LibKNotificationItem-1 being 
missing, and I had to install libknotificationitem-1-devel via 
Yast, and run cmake again. This time, although reporting that 
some optional stuff was missing, it terminated normally with: 

-- Configuring done 
-- Generating done 
-- Build files have been written to: /home/msb/KDEPAGER2/workspace 

Go into the workspace/plasma/applets/pager directory, rename 
pager.cpp to pager.cpp.orig, download the new pager.cpp from: 

 

put it in that directory, and run "make" there. That should 
build the new binary plasma_applet_pager.so in the directory 
workspace/lib . 

Install that new plasma_applet_pager.so binary in place of 
your current one according to the previous instructions above.