Version: (using Devel) Installed from: Compiled sources OS: Linux Using a monitor with a 1920x1200 resolution somehow makes the plasma panel place itself outside the viewable screen (below 1200). No dualhead is involved in my case, but this may be related to the dualhead bugs. I see a horizontal delimiter line in the expected position, which I can click to get the panel settings, and below it an empty space set aside for the panel itself. If I move the delimiter line as low as possible, I get to see a little bit of the panel, as it then moves upwards a few pixels all by itself. Moving the delimiter line lower, however, makes plasma crash the next time e.g. a program is opened or closed (I've probably moved the panel outside its scope). Alternatively, I can lower the resolution to see more of the panel. This happens with Debian's experimental packages, versioned 4.0.74.
Created attachment 24952 [details] missing plasma panel on newly installed KDE4 (scaled down from 1920x1200)
Created attachment 24953 [details] after moving the delimiter line downwards as far as it goes (scaled down from 1920x1200)
is desktop acceleration activated?
Aha! glx was enabled, disabling it (and possibly also extmod) in X.org fixed the plasma problem. Tested in beta1 aka 4.0.80, which I've meantime installed.
Upon further experimentation I've ended up with glx enabled and extmod disabled. While this results in a slow desktop, at least it works. I will now try to determine which extmod extensions are usable.
Narrowed the problem down the extmod extension "shape" in X.org. Omitting shape, with everything else from extmod loaded, yields a working plasma panel. I hope this makes sense to the developers.
so it's again jou with argb visuals so probably it's an X/video drivers bug, don't know if there is much we can do
Forgot to reply, sorry. I've since successfully installed KDE 4.1 betas/snapshots in a VirtualBox VM - without any X.org trickery - so I think you're right about the bug being in an X.org video driver. Since the bug appears not to be in KDE after all, I'll close it.