March 6, 2009

updating to KDE 4.2.1 : delete your plasma files (again)

by orzel
Categories: Gentoo, KDE
Tags:
Comments: 14 Comments

Thanks to the great work of the gentoo KDE packaging team, I have been able to update to KDE 4.2.1 yesterday. And since then, a couple of processes  suck up all my CPUs.

The first one is a well-known issue : lancelot does that when used with Qt 4.5. Ok, this one was quick to remove.

The second one is plasma. Somehow I was not really surprised : it often happens. I usually first blame gentoo for that, and I’ve tried to re-install a few things in order to fix it (like emerge @preserved-ebuilds, and so on…). But actually, that was not the problem. On #gentoo-kde, some other people seem to have either this very same problem, or worse (crashes). Removing your ~/.kde4.2 directory is said to help. That’s too much a loss for me so I have spent a little time to narrow the solution a bit.

And finally the solution is to remove only share/config/plasma*. How come did I not first think about it ?

So if you have the same problem, hopefully now you know how to fix it.


14 Comments »

  1. name says:

    how about adding a version to the plasma config files, so it can rebuild if it see old config files

  2. Andreas says:

    While this should not happen I can tell from experience that programmatically upgrading config files and testing upgrades is a major timesink and often other things are more important :/

  3. Thomas Zander says:

    I haven’t had to remove my config for ages; but since you use lancelot I get the impression your definition of plasma includes all plasmoids too. Including non-released ones.

    Maybe you should blame using unreleased software before blaming a project like plasma? That would be nice to the guys that put sweat and tears into making it nice 🙂

  4. @Thomas Zander
    I have tried hard not to blame anyone.. looks like I failed.

    But anyway, my problem was not the plasmoid crashing, but plasma crashing (maybe?) because of the use of plasmoid. What would you think of KDE crashing because of Firefox ? Or X crashing because an X application did a segfault ?

    Lancelot was the only non-official plasmoid I use. And is also the first thing i’ve removed when trying to fix the problem, exactly for this reason that it was not official.

    And… well, It’s hard to say that in a friendly way, but plasma hardly ever needed a bad plasmoid to crash 😉

  5. Vide says:

    @Thomas: what you are suggesting is not a “fix”, it’s more properly called a “workaround”. Anyway no problem here with my config file in Kubuntu Hardy, passing from 4.2.0 betas til newest 4.2.1

  6. which thomas ? There are two of them on this page!

    I did claim to having fix my issue, not the code or whatever…

  7. Heretic says:

    If a plasmoid causes plasma to crash, it is plasma’s fault! It doesn’t matter how much sweat and tears are put into plasma, a bug is a bug!

  8. arabek says:

    This has actually saved my gentoo-KDE from going into /dev/null.
    I had switched to IceWM in favour of KDE (wich i personally prefer to any other window manager), just because while running KDE the load went horribly high, making my laptop unusable.

    P.S. Question to kde-usability team – is it really that hard, to put a simple alert on first run of a freshly upgraded kde?

    if [[ $kde_old_version != $kde_current_version ]]; then
    raise_alert("Please check your plasma config in case you get a high load from the X Server");
    fi

    (sorry for my lame bash scripting) 😉

  9. Chani says:

    a more tedious but less drastic approach would be to remove plasmoids one by one (or binary-search style if you have lots) until you find the offending one.

    the twitter plasmoid is known to eat cpu sometimes (now if only we knew *why*) and the weather applet was causing trouble in this week’s svn.

    c++ plasmoids will always have the ability to cause this kind of mayhem. maybe I should go bang on the javascript API some more to remind people it’s there…

  10. @chani : yes, i thought about this, but i’m not even sure it’s a plasmoid. My two last crash reports with plasma are related to background configuration for example. And i don’t use any fancy plasmoid. From my backup, I can cite this line from plasmarc :

    used=,notifier,kgetpiechart,digital-clock,lockout,pastebin,nowplaying,trash,systemtray,pager,tasks,weatherstation

    I have more or less re-created my environement ,and the cpu is ok so far…

  11. Soap says:

    I ended up with a plasma problem too. It kept crashing immediately on start up.

    I used the same “fix” as Thomas. I didn’t think to keep any back-up, though.

    I’ve had that config since 4.1.0, but I’ve never changed it by hand. The only widget I used was Twitter, that’s about all I’ve changed.

  12. Ian Monroehttp://www.fark.com/ says:

    Yea really we need more scripted plasmoids. Something like twitter, its only C++ out of historical accident. Seems like a good candidate to be scripted.

    Writing QtScript bindings is pretty easy btw!

  13. Earthwings says:

    sed -i ‘/^lastsize=/d’ ~/.kde/share/config/plasmarc

    That removes the lastsize=xyz lines from plasmarc which were the cause for the crash here.

  14. Jonathan says:

    I just wish I could use the plasma without a crash. Many plasmoids from KDE-Look freeze the KDE, and I need to restart X as well. Indeed the plasma seems to me something I can not touch , different from similar programs for Mac and Windows.

    I do not know who is guilty, I just want to use KDE without worries. We want stability.

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