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

[Alex Schuster]

Whoops, sorry for the other posting. Suddenly this mail got sent, and some 
empty kmail windows opened. Probably due to this effect I sometimes 
experience: The last keypress gets repeated all over the time, and when I 
move the mouse over other windows weird things may happen. Pressing keys 
like Ctrl-Alt-Shift stops it after a while.


Mick writes:

> 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?

Seems to be normal, I also have this with a fresh setup.

> 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:

> > 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).

This service is running - I think KDM did not even come up when I had it 
off once. This must be some KDE-internal dbus error.


> > 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

Thanks! Now I remember reading it.


> >>> 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?

It's set correctly. I'd guess Afghanistan ist simpy the first entry in the 
list of countries, and no one bothered to make the user's country default. 
Or do you have another default?


> > - 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?

That's what I do. But still I'd like to use those desktop indexing 
features.

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

Boy, do I hate to do this. Getting all the settings back takes so much 
work. But now I did it anyways. It took me several hours, and still not 
everying is back as it was, but at least I have I cleaner setup now.
This desktop activity stuff is a mess to set up. I have 8 desktops for 
different things I do, each one with its own activity. That is, those KDE 
plasmoids appear on that desktop only, not on every one. But while you can 
send a window to any desktop easily, moving a plasmoid from one activity 
to another does not seem to be possible. When I accidentally selected 
Enlightenment-KDE instead of Enlightenment, KDE4 started up with 
Enlightenment as window manager, which messed up the location of each 
desktop. I had to edit stuff in .kde4/share/config/plasma-desktop-
appletsrc by hand to correct this.


Impressions:

Some things are indeed fixed.

- Konqueror now respects the setting that it should ask before closing a 
window with multiple tabs.

- Dolphin no longer opens maximized.

- Ark no longer opens the home directory with dolphin when extracting 
files.

- And Akonadi starts without errors! Except for the last login, when again 
no resource agents were found. Did not happen again (yet).

KDE4 Problems that still happen:

- Strigi scans already indexed files, then crashes. Repeats a cuple of 
times, then exits. Syslog shows sefgaults in nepomukservices.

- Dolphin FTP does not work with Umlauts. And I have to enter the password 
twice.

- Konsole profiles have to be activated in the profile dialog before they 
show up in the menu.

- Kmail did not save this e-mail, I lost my edits when my whole system 
just crashed. Now I wonder what _this_ was.

- Sessions are often saved incorrectly. Then some konquerors are missing, 
a dolphin is on the wrong desktop.

- At session startup, konqueror always complains it dies unexpectedly and 
offers to restore the session, unless I close every instance before 
logout.

- This session restore of konquereror works sometimes, and sometimes not. 
And all konqueror windows it opens belong to the same process, so when one 
window dies, all die.

- No automatic spell checking in kmail. And no English language to select, 
only German.

- When the desktop is locked, the password dialog sometimes does not 
accept the password. It is all lowercase letters, letter position 
independent of keyboard layout. Switching to a text console and back 
helped. Oh, did I already mention that sometimes when switching back into 
graphics mode, I get an empty screen, and have to reboot then?

- Under heavy load, when switching to a locked desktop, it sometimes takes 
quite a while until it blanks and the password dialog appears. In the 
meantime, it probably cannot be used, but at least everything is clearly 
visible.

- Trying to move a plasmoid from the panel onto the desktops crashes 
plasma.

- This plasma stuff has its problems. Sometimes plasmoids have the wrong 
position, or refuse to be dragged or changed in size (they return to the 
former state after the operation).

- I thought it was gone... but then again the mouse only worked in parts 
of the active window. When I close it via keyboard, the next active 
windows becomes partially responsive to the mouse. I have to log out then.

- KDE4 eats A LOT of memory. I have about 30 tabs open in konquerors, this 
alone is 1 GB after a while. And X is not much less.

- nspluginviewer processes often eat a lot of CPU power. So I frequently 
kill them with killall nspluginviewer, I have a little button for this 
purpose in the panel. And system loads gets much lower. It's still quite 
high, though.

- I'm sure I forgot some.

Other frequent problems:

- This repeating key problem I mentioned. And sometimes I have some sort 
of caps lock feature, but for Ctrl or Alt. I can remove it by pressing all 
those meta keys at once.

- After using the fullscreen mode of VMware, modifier keys like alt, shift 
and ctrl stopped working, except inside an NX session I had also running.

- Starting a specific program that ready 1.5 GB of data just made the 
system hang for two times. The Magic SysRq stuff worked, although I did 
not get out of graphics mode, so I had to reboot.

- Suspending to RAM does not work at all.

- Hibernating with TuxOnIce works sometimes, but sometimes resuming stops 
with some "Opening LUKS. Killed." message, or the suspend image is ignored 
and a normal boot happens.

- I have a Radeon HD 3200. I tried the radeon drivers instead of ati-
drivers (fglrx), but did not get acceleration ([dri] RADEONDRIGetVersion 
failed (libdri too old)). But thats's still be best result I ever got with 
tose drivers. I removed the blocking ati-drivers and updated to xorg 1.8, 
then radeon worked with acceleration. But when I move the mouse onto the 
panel in KDE4, X dies instantly without anything in syslog except for a 'X 
server for display :0 terminated unexpectedly' message.

- mplayer sometimes play videos with colors totally messed up, like if 
some parameter like brightness or gamme was set realyl really high, so 
sometimes nothing at all can be seen.

	Wonko