Re: [gentoo-user] KDE? Get me out of here!

[Mick]

Before you read specific answers below, you may want to check:

$ echo $XDG_DATA_DIRS
/usr/local/share:/usr/share

in your logs is shows:

Environment variable XDG_DATA_DIRS is set to
'/usr/share:/usr/local/share:/usr/share'

Why is /usr/share in there twice?  Could this mess things up?

On 17 June 2010 00:23, Alex Schuster <wonko@×××××××××.org> wrote:
[snip ...]

> Mick wrote:
>
>> On Tuesday 09 March 2010 20:12:09 Alex Schuster wrote:
>
>>> - Kontact. The old address book I had imported fro KDE 3.5 half a
>>> year ago showed one "address book" and many std.vcf (or similar) files,
>>> with my data scattered on them. I moved all stuff into the "address
>>> book", and did not use it for a while
>>> Now I wanted to do so, but it did not run due to an error with akonadi.
>>
>> Did you try to create a local resource using your systemsettings and
>> point it to the local KDE3.5 contacts file?  If you restart the address
>> book, then akonadi will kick in a carry out the migration - if it does
>> not succeed it will tell you so.  In that case you may need to fix
>> things manually (I've posted how in an older thread of mine, where I
>> managed to make akonadi to succeed in its migration from a local
>> resource file using sqlite - I don't have mysql in this box.  Let me
>> know if you can't find it.)
>
> I just tried that. I first added a dir-resource, as there are several .vcf
> files in my .kde3.5/share/appes/kabc directory. BTW, I had to copy that
> directory, as the file chooser did not show directories starting with a
> dot.
> Nothing happened when I restarted kontact. I did the same with a file-
> resource, when I noticed that all the .vcf files were identical. Again,
> nothing happened.
>
> But: There are errors when akonadi is starting up during login. I think it
> did not do this when I wrote the last mail, but probably this is the
> problem now for the migration does not work. I attached the error parts of
> the log.

Can you run /etc/init.d/dbus restart before you try again?  Your
akonadi log complains about dbus (amidst other things).

> And I looked for your posting, and searched all of my gentoo-user archive,
> but somehow I did not find it. If you think it would help in my case, and
> if you still have it at hand, it would be nice if you could direct me to
> it (the subject would be enough).

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.user/224044

but this was about me being able to run the akonadi migration without
having to install mysql.  I used sqlite instead.  Have a look at the
file I refer to anyway, just in case something is amiss in there.

>>> I tried to figure out what this was, and how to get the error message
>>> in English, but then I found out that I only have to restart kontact.
>>> Fine, now I want to add a contact. First, when I want to edit the
>>> location, the country is set to Afghanistan, I always have to change
>>> this to Germany.
>>> Annoying, why is this so, who would want this behaviour, except for
>>> Afghans perhaps.
>>
>> Have you tried to set up your locale in systemsettings to Germany?
>
> Yes, it's set like that.

Have you set up your local timezone in /etc/conf.d/clock, in case this
affects it?

>>> - Dolphin can do FTP, but I have to repeat the login process several
>>> times until I see the destination files.
>>
>> I've also noticed an error when I try to connect with ftp saying that
>> the connection failed, but then if I click on reload it connects fine.
>
> Works sometimes, and sometimes not. Also, sometimes the content is not
> updated when I dragged files via FTP.
> Other current dolphin problems:
> - Opens maximized horizontally every time, except at session startup.
> - The sorting is strange sometimes: Foo-1.srt, Foo-2.avi,
> Foo-1.avi, Foo-2.srt
> - When the KDE session comes up, all dolphins have the same view. I'd like
> one of them to have a different view, but when I do this, next time the
> session comes up all dolphins will have this view, too. There is an option
> to remember every folder's view, but every time I open a new folder, it
> opens in symbol view first, not in the current view of the upper folder.

These could all be bugs with dolphin.  I've had different problems
with it on 3 Gentoo boxen + 1 Ubuntu.

>>> - Of course, Amarok keeps doing weird things. At least I can play music
>>> from my collection. But playing a stream sometimes crashes it. And
>>> dragging files into Amarok always leads to a crash. Yeah, I know,
>>> Amarok is not KDE.
>>
>> Given up on that long ago (and sadly have not found a nice replacement
>> which won't pull in the whole of Gnome or worse)
>
> It's getting better. It's more stable, and startup time is now 30 seconds
> instead of 7 minutes.
> Have you tried clementine? It has the look of Amarok.

I had a go at Clementine, but if I recall correctly it wasn't friendly
with shoutcast streams.

>>> But at least one bug was fixed, I got a mail from bugzilla about this
>>> today. It's the bug that makes password dialogs not work if the
>>> password is to be displayed as three bullets. Wow, nearly two months
>>> after it had been reported, this serious bug was at least confirmed to
>>> exist and is fixed now. Maybe this bug happens seldomly, but when it
>>> happens, much of KDE4 is unusable, as you have no kmail, no kwallet,
>>> nothing that needs a password works.
>>>
>> Hmm ... no such problem over here.
>
> Had you set the password dialog to show 3 bullets for each key pressed?
>
> Another pretty bad thing that happened: Once when I started kontact, it
> showed me a birthday I had forgotten, two days AFTER the birthday
> It did not bother to remind me the days before when kontact was runing all
> the time. Now, what's the purpose of an organizer when you cannot trust it
> to show appointments? Good thing I don't use it much.
>
>
>>> Dale, you brave, brave man, are you really using KDE4 now?
>
> Still thinking about dumping it. The current most annoying bug is that
> about once a day the mouse stops working. I can move it, xeyes keeps
> watching it, and sometimes I can still use it inside a part of klast
> active window. But for nothing else. So I have to log out and back in
> again.
> I'm not sure what the problem is, it happened after I updated to
> kde-4.4.3, xorg-1.7 and ati-drivers 10.4. Downgrading ati-drivers did not
> help, downgrading xorg did not succeed, I got compilation errors and gave
> up, as I suspect that it's KDE itself. But a downgrade to 4.4.2 would take
> a while, and I'd expect that alll hell might breake loose if I let this
> older version mess with my current .kde4 directory.
> I hoped that a reinstall (because switching to a 64 bit OS) would
> magically solve this, but it didn't. I tried to kill and restart kwin and
> plasma-desktop, this did not help.
>
> Current list of other, but not so bad problems:
> - Konquerer used to ask if I really want to close it, or just the current
> tab. Not since 4.4.4.
> - Ark cannot save all selected files via drag&drop, only one. And then it
> opens the home folder with dolphin, not the destination folder.
> - Automatic spell checking no longer happens in kmail or konqueror.
> - Session saving sometimes fails. I always back up my .kde4 before I dare
> this.
> - Once my activities were on the wrong desktops, it took me a while until
> I had thinsg back as they should be.
> - Konqueror crashes a lot.
> - And every login the dialog comes up telling me that konqueror crashed,
> unless I quit every running instance before logging out of KDE.
> - Konsole profiles show up in the menu only after I activated them in the
> profile dialog. Some of the things I have to repeat after every login into
> KDE.
> - Strigi indexes some directory over and over again and again and again
> and again. And again and again. Then it crashes, and when I re-activate
> it, it indexes the folder again and again and again. And so on.

You may want to switch off strigi in systemsettings?

BTW, have you tried removing ~/.kde4 and then login into KDE afresh?
-- 
Regards,
Mick