I recently installed KDE and am having some desktop issues.

I have openSUSE 12.1 and KDE 4.7.2 release 5 installed.
The computer is an old Dell optiplex GX260, Pentium 4, 2GB Ram.

I seem to have similar problems to these posts:

viewtopic.php?f=111&t=98827&p=212470

viewtopic.php?f-66&t=31363

But I'm very new at openSuse and KDE so I'm not positive what my next step should be. Symptoms in more detail: Everything boots up fine, but after a little bit of use (hard to replicate exactly when or how), the icons on the desktop will get a black box around them, all the text in the 'start menu' will turn black (icons usually remain), and the text on the bottom bar also turn black. Possibly unrelated is that, again, after a while, the system freezes so I can do nothing except for a hard-shutdown.

Any suggestions appreciated.... I'm new at this.

In exploring how my issue compares to the first link I supplied, it looks like I have Mesa 7.11 installed and glxinfo says, in part, this:

direct rendering: Yes

OpenGL vendor string: Tungsten Graphics, Inc
OpenGL renderer string: Mesa DRI Intel(R) 845G x86/MMX/SSE2

so I think things are ok there....

I think I can replicate this. It seems to be related to using the activity manager. Here's a screenshot showing the black squares around icons and the awful rendering at the bottom

http://tinypic.com/r/351x4c2/5

Ooh, that is certainly very corrupted. If you disable Desktop Effects prior to attempting to use the Activity Manager, can you reproduce?

Are you aware of what type of Intel graphics your system has?

Thank you for your reply. Disabling desktop effects does seem to be doing the trick, but I now can't reproduce it either way. I'll keep working on it.

There are no video cards in the available slots in this machine (Dell optiplex GX260 SFF) so that means it is using the "on-board video", which I can't find any information on exactly what that is. (And I spent quite a while trying to figure that out).

Again, thanks for the suggestion, I'll report back if this continues to happen or if I can narrow it down some more.
Tim

If you check the output of "lspci" then you should be able to see it. For instance, my machine has:

Code: Select all

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Core Processor Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 18)

This works for both integrated and discrete cards.

here's my output from lspci:

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 82845G/GL[Brookdale-G]/GE/PE DRAM Controller/Host-Hub Interface (rev 01)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 82845G/GL[Brookdale-G]/GE Chipset Integrated Graphics Device (rev 01)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 01)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 01)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 01)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-M) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 01)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 PCI Bridge (rev 81)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL (ICH4/ICH4-L) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 01)
00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801DB (ICH4) IDE Controller (rev 01)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) SMBus Controller (rev 01)
00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 01)
01:0c.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82540EM Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 02)


I'm still having problems and I'll try to get back on this now

Although these 'black border' video issues continue to crop up, replicating continues to be elusive. It seems to happen after one set of actions (downloading a pdf using firefox, searching for a command on Konsole), but then I can't get it to do it again. Here's another rendering example that occurs -- not nearly as much as a problem as the other. Hovering over one of the 'open windows' buttons on the bottom bar will show the pop-up information icon with black bars around it. As this screenshot shows for Firefox
http://tinypic.com/r/rwqo42/5

Interestingly, with FF and Konsole both open, only the FF info balloon has the black bars around it.

OK, I can replicate a minor version of this effect - I've been able to do this consistently after restarting KDE (ctrl-alt-backspace).

With a clean restart, I simply click on the "SuSE Desktop' icon on my desktop (from the default install). This opens the welcome style window. Then I click "Show introduction to KDE', which automatically opens my browser (Firefox) but keeps the openSUSE window in the front. The FF icon at the bottom flashes, STAYS BLACK, and then gains the black border if hovered over.

I wonder if they key action is that the program created an action in the background but then kept its window in the foreground and, while trying to notify my that something was happening in the background, the rendering got messed up?
Tim

In System Settings > Desktop Effects > Advanced, what "Compositing type" and "Qt graphics system" do you have selected? (Note that you may not have the Qt one, in which case ignore that).

I've got "OpenGL" as the compositing type, but no option for "Qt Graphics". But also note on the general tab I've got "Enable desktop effects at startup" unchecked.

Should I switch from OpenGL to XRender?

OpenGL should work fine. I'm out of ideas. Do the KWin people have any ideas here?

At least http://tinypic.com/r/351x4c2/5 is for sure not related to the compositor and http://tinypic.com/r/rwqo42/5 does not like compositing is active either.

I'd say either the plasma (sub)theme (for composited desktops) or its cache is broken.

=> try to change the plasma theme, then remove all plasma_theme_*.kcache cache entries, then change back

cache files should reside in /var/tmp/kdecache-`whoami`

Wow, there might be something here with the desktop themes. I downloaded two new desktop themes (Aya, Blue_Sora) and neither of them worked properly - in both cases they had some version of the black boxes or unreadability of some portion of the desktop. The default theme "Air openSUSE" also has some issues in the bottom bar - see this screen shot
http://tinypic.com/r/28miukg/5

I deleted the temp files, and reset the desktop to Air. So far this morning the desktop has been behaving.

Thank you! I'll try it out for a bit longer to see if this is completely solved.

Do you have something called "bleachbit" installed / in use?
Another option would be buggy behavior in the pixmap rendering. Since transparent areas seem to be affected, try removing the cache and use another graphicssystem next time

pkill plasma-desktop; sleep 1; plasma-desktop --graphicssystem raster
pkill plasma-desktop; sleep 1; plasma-desktop --graphicssystem native
pkill plasma-desktop; sleep 1; plasma-desktop --graphicssystem opengl

You can expect opengl to be bug & glitch prone.
If the raster system does an image up- and download for the pixmap cache, that could cause trouble while the application is deconstructed (so caching better doesn't happen then) - in this case you can try to avoid the glib event dispatcher
pkill plasma-desktop; sleep 1; QT_NO_GLIB=1plasma-desktop
^ NO semicolon here

Either way you should wipe the cache after each occasion of the issue and as soon as you figure what causes this, call back. This needs to be filed against the cache or lib/plasma - depending on what causes it.

Yast2 found bleachbit but it looks like I don't have it installed. I'm working on your other suggestions.