Hello,

I'm a fresh Gentoo 2008.0 user and decided to try out the 4.1.X branch of KDE. I have emerged the 4.1.4 packages.

I have discovered some weird issues trying to evaluate the feature set and changes from the 3.5.X branch.

I will detail them separately below:

1. Enabling font anti-aliasing causes the clock text and the names of the tasks in the taskbar to disappear. I did not observed if other text parts disappear also. This issue can be observed upon a new login, not immediately.

2. Logging out of KDE to the login manager and logging back in causes the windows decorations (titlebars and borders) to disappear. As well as the task's buttons in the taskbar. The KMenu functions correctly and the desktop elements are visible but all the windows (even dialogs and prompts) are borderless and they lack he window titlebar.

3. Using the latest ATI proprietary driver on an ATI Radeon 3870, with desktop effects enabled, all the window resize operations are laggy. Minimize and maximize operations take between 5 to 10 seconds. I noticed that all operations that do not involve already drawn content are affected. For example, wobbly windows performs flawless with any existing windows until i try to resize them

This issues were observed on a freshly installed Gentoo with no previous versions of KDE ever being installed.

Please tell me if you need any configuration or log files.

Thank you in advance for your assistance.

The Window Titlebar is powered by your Window Manager. In the case of KDE this is KWin. Please ensure that KWin is selected in System Settings > Default Applications > Window Manager.

The window resizing problem is due to the inherent design of the proprietary drivers. The data has to be copied from the graphics to the CPU and then back for every tiny change in size. Naturally this is inefficent. There is nothing KDE can do about this, only ATI can correct this in their drivers.

Font anti-aliasing is provided by the KDE underlying framework, Qt. However I am not aware of why this might happen.

KDE 4.2 will come out tomorrow, and should promptly be added to the portage tree once the official tarballs are available.

Maybe then your problems will be solved

Thank you for your response, Mr. bcooksley.

KWin is selected as the window manager, the issue is encountered only when i log out and log back in.

If i restart the computer altogether the problem does not manifest.

@Alec

Well, yes and no. If i do not identify the cause of my problems maybe they will not go away by themselves once i perform the upgrade to 4.2
Don't you agree ?

When you login again, and KWin has not restored itself, open Konsole, and run this command:

Code: Select all

pidof kwin

I am thinking that on boot up somewhere executes KWin, but on login this doesn't execute.
You might also want to check the value of $WINDOWMANAGER after both bootup then normal login.

Daniel wrote:@Alec

Well, yes and no. If i do not identify the cause of my problems maybe they will not go away by themselves once i perform the upgrade to 4.2
Don't you agree ?

Well 4.2 is a major release. They made quite a lot of changes in the past half a year, so the problems you may have could have been caused by bugs. KDE 4.2 is a pretty big improvement over 4.1, and I would recommend upgrading to it once it is released.

No problem, i'll upgrade as soon as the ebuilds become available.

@bcooksley

I will try your steps as soon as i have some spare time and get back with the results of the tests you recommended, thank you.

Hello,

After the upgrade the initial issues still persist in KDE 4.2

KWin seems a little more snappy when composition is enabled, the resizing issue is still present though.

Logging out of KDE and logging back in now causes for the window manager to not start at all. The anti aliasing issue persists also.

Could you please try under a new user to see if you can reproduce?