[gentoo-user] KDE plasmashell and wallpapers.

[Dale]

Howdy,

It seems plasmashell and wallpapers for the desktop has a problem.  I'm
not sure if it is just me or if it could affect others.  Either way, I
have no idea how to fix it.  I have a LOT of wallpapers that I've
downloaded/collected over the years.  Some are NASA pics of Mars, stars,
galaxies and a whole lot of others that I've accumulated over the last
15 years or so.  According to Dolphin and the properties box, it's well
over 100,000 of them.  I have them all in a directory named, wait for
it, wallpapers.  Under that they are sorted in directories by what they
are, where they come from or whatever.  I try not to go to deep but it
does pick up at least two or three levels deep.  I've had it set that
way for ages and it has always worked with the only problem being it
picking them at random.  Some are intended to be like a slideshow. 
Anyway, they added the option of doing them in different orders
including a-z, which is nice.  It will be nicer if I can get it to work
now.  ;-)

Problem.  When I have it set to the main directory and I login to KDE,
plasmashell goes nuts.  It hogs up a full CPU core and never stops. 
It's not exactly memory friendly either.  The little panel thingy at the
bottom, the thing with the clock and the pager etc, locks up tight.  The
clock doesn't change, you can't select anything with it or anything
else.  Just for giggles, I left it for half a hour or so hoping it would
finish whatever it was doing but it never did.  Killing plasmashell and
restarting results in the same problem.  Once it does that, I have to
downgrade to a earlier version of plasma.  While fiddling with it today,
I had the idea of manually restarting plasmashell and letting it show on
the screen what it was doing.  Since the panel thingy won't work,
neither does the clipboard so no copy and paste of the actual error
itself.  What it showed me tho was that the wallpapers was the problem. 
It said something about bad metadata for each and every wallpaper image
I have stored.  I can't recall the error exactly but may can reproduce
it later.  I suspect when the option to have them random or in order was
added, something changed in the way it looks at the directory.  Thing
is, I have no idea how to make this work like it should with all of them
enabled.

My temporary solution, I pointed it to a small directory that only has a
couple dozen images in it.  That seems to work.  Setting it to the whole
directory after that tho, does the same as above.  So doing a sort of
reset doesn't help.  Heck, at one point, I cleaned up the living room,
took out the trash and did some other stuff while it was banging away
with a core on my CPU.  Thing never did finish.

Anyone even know where to start with this?  I've got it narrowed down to
it being a issue with wallpapers.  I just don't know where to go from
here.  Is it supposed to do that for some reason and I'm the only one
with a HUGE collection?  Surely not. 

Thanks.

Dale

:-)  :-)