Hi! - Kubuntu 9.10... have had issues with intermittent freezing (no REISUB, nothing) for the last 3 major versions of Kubuntu... keep hoping it will go away, but not yet. :-)

Before asking for help on tracking it down, i wanted to wipe my KDE profile to see if it helps (freeze never happens when i boot to root shell, never happens in XP). Can i just move my .kde folder to .kde-backup and next login it will auto-generate a new one that i can configure, and then i can switch to the old whenever i want?

Do i run any risks of anything being confused or messed up when/if i switch back to my original .kde folder? (I mean besides basic system configs like colors and plasma widgets, hotkey setup, etc etc... not worried about that...) E.g. hopefully other KDE integrated apps aren't storing any data in the .kde folder, but rather in their own config folders?

I guess i should also move my .kderc to a backup when i do this?

Thanks!

-c

It is safe the move ~/.kde elsewhere only outside KDE itself. You will probably also want to erase the following directories at the same time also:

/var/tmp/kdecache-$USER
/tmp/kde-$USER
/tmp/ksocket-$USER

These directories *must* be removed only when KDE is not running ( ie. logout, then switch to a virtual terminal and remove them there )

bcooksley wrote:It is safe the move ~/.kde elsewhere only outside KDE itself.

Super, thanks for the reply. The above sentence is the only part i'm not sure i understand: what do you mean by "only outside KDE itself"? Meaning, while KDE is not running? That's what i plan to do, from a plain terminal, as you suggested after.

Thanks!
-c

chconnor wrote:Super, thanks for the reply. The above sentence is the only part i'm not sure i understand: what do you mean by "only outside KDE itself"? Meaning, while KDE is not running? That's what i plan to do, from a plain terminal, as you suggested after.

Answering instead of bcooksley, but yep, you got it right.

What kind of issues are you facing if REISUB doesn't work? It's never failed me, even when Xorg is completely dead (no other keyboard shortcuts work) or HAL fails to detect my keyboard.
Are you sure REISUB works normally? Some distros disable it for security reasons.

E.g. hopefully other KDE integrated apps aren't storing any data in the .kde folder, but rather in their own config folders?

KDE applications store their configuration in that directory, moving it will wipe their settings as well. You may want to do a backup copy of ~/.kde and only remove selected config files, such as workspace files (~/.kde/share/config/plasma*). I would also disable some features from System Settings, such as KWin compositing and Strigi indexing.

Another way is to create a new user and see if you find the same problem there, but this works best if you know how to reproduce the issue (which isn't the case here, it seems).

Hi, and thanks...

Hans wrote:What kind of issues are you facing if REISUB doesn't work? It's never failed me, even when Xorg is completely dead (no other keyboard shortcuts work) or HAL fails to detect my keyboard.
Are you sure REISUB works normally? Some distros disable it for security reasons.

Yeah, i'm 99% sure REISUB works... (i will test again, however, and follow up here if i was mistaken.)

If i'm using my computer (Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop) ~6 hours a day, then approximately every 2 days (although that's totally variable) it will, at a random time, freeze solid. Screen image remains, but everything stops (no HD, etc.) Can't ssh into it, no virtual terminals, no REISUB. I have tried in vain to correlate it to anything: applications, CPU load, networking, temperature of the laptop (I thought i noticed the slightest correlation to the laptop being warm, but it definitely happens cold as well), time of day, hardware usage or interconnection, lunar phase, etc., but have found no patterns. It has happened within 2 minutes of reaching the desktop, it has happened after many hours of use. If audio happens to be playing at the time, then right as it's freezing it will stutter ~three times, as if the last 100ms of so of audio is replayed 3 times in immediate succession, and then silence.

Following a crash I've rebooted into recovery mode and looked at various logs for errors, etc, but i'm no expert. Before making this post i was planning to do a little more reading before i pestered any forums, but if you have any ideas i'm all ears. :-) I suppose the first step is the .kde profile we're talking about, so i'll get on that. If you (or anyone else) wants to track this down, i'm totally willing to go the distance on this one; it's been driving me nuts for a couple years now.

Other quirks that may or may not be relevant:

* i occasionally get the "plasma-desktop" crash, which seems to restart just fine and so i've more or less ignored it, after some historic attempts to figure that out, which failed. I think that crept in with a recent update: it was happening for a while, then seemed to resolve (9.04?) and now seems to be back (9.10?).

* because of the freezing, i often boot into a root terminal to run a camera time-lapse program which runs for many hours at a stretch (e.g. 12), and this freeze has never happened in that mode.

* this has never happened when booting to windows on this laptop, many years of use

...so i was wondering if KDE could be related, or if somehow it was drawing out some glitch in my hardware, etc.

KDE applications store their configuration in that directory, moving it will wipe their settings as well. You may want to do a backup copy of ~/.kde and only remove selected config files, such as workspace files (~/.kde/share/config/plasma*). I would also disable some features from System Settings, such as KWin compositing and Strigi indexing.

Ok. I will probably just move the whole thing, and deal. And Nepomuk/Strigi have always been disabled, same with all desktop effects.

Another way is to create a new user and see if you find the same problem there, but this works best if you know how to reproduce the issue (which isn't the case here, it seems).

Does creating a new user achieve anything that a new .kde directory does not?

Thanks very much!
-c

chconnor wrote:Yeah, i'm 99% sure REISUB works...

Well, the 1% will always get you. :-)

I log out of KDE and see the window manager, Ctrl-alt-F1 to a term, and do REISUB. I see nothing obvious happening for the R, E, or B. The I and U generate some output about the log level changing. (And the reboot doesn't happen.)

Dunno if this proves anything:

$ cat /proc/sys/kernel/sysrq
1

So maybe REISUB is not fully operational for me?

Anyway, i will proceed with .kde experimentation and report back.

Also, incidentally, i've run memtest and it showed nothing, and the regular disk checks show no errors.

-c

I would most definitely recommend disabling KWin's desktop effects in this case. Which graphics card & driver do you use?

bcooksley wrote:I would most definitely recommend disabling KWin's desktop effects in this case. Which graphics card & driver do you use?

Thanks, yes i've always had desktop effects disabled, for several years.

Graphics are "integrated" intel graphics, i believe:

$ lspci | grep VGA
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc M22 [Mobility Radeon X300]

lsmod shows:

video 19380 0
radeon 636000 2

(i.e. not using any proprietary drivers, to my memory)

New .kde directory now in effect... i'll see how that goes...

Thanks!
-c

chconnor wrote:New .kde directory now in effect... i'll see how that goes...

It was looking good for a few days and then... hung today.

If anyone has any thoughts on what else i could try, i'm ready for them.

Of course i'll be happy to enable/disable anything, post logs, etc. etc. In the past i've booted post-crash into a root shell and looked at various system/error logs. I didn't turn anything up, but i'm not well-informed...

I'm still looking at X or KDE as "causing" this (though i understand the complexities involved and that that isn't entirely fair) just because, as mentioned before, i've run the laptop for many, many hours over the past year (probably as much as with KDE) through a non-graphical shell and never had it hang.

I'm pretty used to KDE, and like it very much, but i suppose the next logical thing would be to install Gnome or something and see if it still crashes. Kinda hoping to avoid that, but i'll do what i gotta.

Thanks for any attention to this,
-C

In case no-one has said this to you - never delete your .kde directory. If you re-name it, it has the same effect, and if it turns out that nothing has changed you can recover all your settings as you had them before. In addition to this, you may well have data such as mail, addressbook and diary in there - delete the directory and you lose the lot.

There's no doubt that KDE stresses the video driver, and that there have been bugs filed against X, so you may well have reached the stage of trial and error. Sorry that I don't have any useful suggestions on that line.

annew wrote:In case no-one has said this to you - never delete your .kde directory.

Thanks, yeah, i just renamed it.

annew wrote:There's no doubt that KDE stresses the video driver, and that there have been bugs filed against X, so you may well have reached the stage of trial and error. Sorry that I don't have any useful suggestions on that line.

Thanks. I'll probably bite the bullet and try gnome for a week or two to see if it makes a difference. Even if it does, i'm not sure what that would tell me or if it would lead anywhere useful, except to lower the odds that X is "at fault".

I just wish there was a log somewhere that provided a clue... I've looked at:

/var/log/messages
/var/log/kdm.log
/var/log/Xorg.0.log

...maybe others i've forgotten. Seems like the crash is hard enough that nothing even knows it's coming.

Maybe there are chunks of KDE functionality i can disable (besides compositing/desktop effects, which have never been on for me)?

-c

Update: so far no crashes. Except for once: I accidentally started gwenview (KDE image viewer) in gnome (hadn't made proper file association yet). A few minutes later the computer hung... interesting. So, no hangs while in pure gnome world, but one after gwenview loaded whatever KDE subsystems... i'm sticking with gnome a while longer though to be sure it "never" hangs before pointing any fingers at KDE... with 10.04 about to release i'll probably have to do another round of waiting under KDE again... sure hope i can work it out because i prefer KDE...

-c

Another update: upgraded to Kubuntu 10.04 soon after it was released (from 9.10). That's about a month ago... so far, no hangs! Very happy for that. I seem to remember that pattern happening at last upgrade though... got to 9.10 and for a while all was well. But this seems longer, and that bodes well. So i'm considering it automagically fixed until further notice.

-c