I use KDE since a long time now and there is one thing that I do not understand: I shutdown my linux+KDE computer and something like a kernel panic happens (sometimes in a year, not often). The cause for yesterday's panic was the graphics driver/drm part, so nothing serious and not regarded to my disks or other important hardware.

Now: when I boot the computer again everything works but the KDE desktop and akregator lose all their settings (and the feedlist is corrupted).
I am curious: If I did not change the configuration (like control panel, clock, wallpaper setup etc) or my feeds for months, why are they lost and reset to default -- not only once, but always?

There are only two reasons I can think of, why the contents of a file can be lost:
a) The filesystem is damaged. Well, it is not: No lost+found files and (only) the desktop and akregator are always affected, even if the .kde folder was created completely new while the old .kde folder was renamed, which results in new files in different places on the disk (which excludes bad sectors). Further, I use a raid1 and xfs with journalling, so the files have to be lost on both disks at the same time. All this is very improbable.

b) Let us have a look at akregator without loss of generality: the feedlist is a simple xml file and the contents were not touched, which technically means, the file should not have been opened for writing. But in this case, let us assume the file was opened for writing by a akregator, the content completely wiped and then akregator was about to write the contents from memory in one burst when the crash happened.
I do not like this probability either, because the journalling should rollback the file and as a programmer I personally would not write a configuration file if the user did not change anything and I especially would not wipe it to write it completely again (if I already use a xml parser to read the file, then I use it to update changes only).

Well, is there another case that I missed? What is happening? And what can be done to prevent that?
I could put my .kde folder into a git repository and roll everything back that I did not do explicitly by myself. Example: I change the wallpaper, check with git status what happened, add and commit the file with the wallpaper settings. And after every reboot, before kde even starts, I write a script that resets the .kde folder to HEAD, so whatever the kde programs "think" they should do is undone and I am in total control like it has to be. Further, this will be very much faster than clicking through thousand places and resetting everything manually. Sounds nice, I guess I will do it...

Oh, one last thing:

Code: Select all

~/.kde4/share/apps/akregator/data $ du -h *
8,0K    feeds.opml
8,0K    feeds.opml~
0       feeds.opml-backup.1328010931
0       feeds.opml-backup.1328876337
0       feeds.opml-backup.1329906220
0       feeds.opml-backup.1329906289
0       feeds.opml-backup.1331795725


very nice backups with exactly nothing in it Good, that I have my own backup.

fwiw - I had the same problem with akregator when going down "ungraciously" which proved a real pita. It also lacked basic RSS features such as tagging and I decided to give thunderbird a go. I haven't looked back...

Oh, what I did was keep a working copy of ~/.kde(4)/share/apps/akregator/data/feeds.opml handy so I could rewrite it over the old one - bit of a hack but it worked.

This is unusual. Can you confirm that the file was blanked as part of this Kernel panic?

bcooksley wrote:This is unusual. Can you confirm that the file was blanked as part of this Kernel panic?

I cannot confirm that because I did not check this folder before the crash. All I remember is, that the backup files often were useless in the past, which is why I keep my own copy of feeds.opml like toad said.

mark_ wrote:

bcooksley wrote:This is unusual. Can you confirm that the file was blanked as part of this Kernel panic?

i have exactly the same problem. here it wasn't a kernel panic but a power outage. exactly the same symptoms:

• kde desktop reset to defaults including all widgets, background image, position of the run dialog...basically everything except custom keyboard shortcuts...they still work
• akregator feeds xml file has 0 bytes
• konversation config is reset
  

everything else seems to work perfectly fine.

edit: oh, and also my desktop configs had not changed in weeks before the power failure.

This is a severe number of files which are changed. If you have access to it, can you check 'dmesg' to see is fsck 'repaired' anything? If so, the repairs may have resulted in the KDE configuration files being removed - or not being returned to a 100% intact state (it is likely KDE applications hold their configuration files open, and could possibly be in the middle of writing changes when the system goes offline unexpectedly). This is especially true of Plasma.