I am using KDE 4.10.4 on an upgraded Linux Mint 13 to 15. When I open system settings and click the Display and Monitor section then Screen Locker, if the screen saver is enabled by modifying ~/.kde/share/config/kscreensaverrc it crashes immediately, if not then it comes up fine but as soon as I click the radio button for screen saver it crashes. I tested the screen saver and it works fine, I just have to modify the file manually.

System Details:

• Pentium M 745
• 1GB Ram
• 40GB HDD
• Old and Decrepit Syndrome

Are you able to generate a backtrace from the Developer Information tab and post it here please?
This shouldn't happen - only thing I can think of is that it is trying to use an OpenGL screensaver - are you able to use Desktop Effects with OpenGL?

bcooksley wrote:Are you able to generate a backtrace from the Developer Information tab and post it here please?
This shouldn't happen - only thing I can think of is that it is trying to use an OpenGL screensaver - are you able to use Desktop Effects with OpenGL?

Actually I can't get Desktop Effects to turn on... I will check into generating a stack trace and post back in 30 minutes or so.

sounds as if X fails loading the GLX extension.

-> try wheter "glxinfo" prints sth. reasonable or just crashes and also check /var/log/Xorg.0.log for errors (EE) and esp. on GLX (you can also inspect the output of "xdpyinfo -queryExtensions | less" loaded extensions are on about the second page.

in case "glxinfo" segfaults and or GLX is not loaded otherwise: do you have an AMD GPU?

There were recently many bug reports from users with concurrent (radeon|intel)/mesa and fglrx installations (intel for hybrid systems) - in this case best contact your distro on how to get rid of this mess and about what combination their current driver selection supports.

luebking wrote:sounds as if X fails loading the GLX extension.

-> try wheter "glxinfo" prints sth. reasonable or just crashes and also check /var/log/Xorg.0.log for errors (EE) and esp. on GLX (you can also inspect the output of "xdpyinfo -queryExtensions | less" loaded extensions are on about the second page.

in case "glxinfo" segfaults and or GLX is not loaded otherwise: do you have an AMD GPU?

There were recently many bug reports from users with concurrent (radeon|intel)/mesa and fglrx installations (intel for hybrid systems) - in this case best contact your distro on how to get rid of this mess and about what combination their current driver selection supports.

The stack trace is here and the output of glxinfo is here.

GLX is ok, however: "OpenGL renderer string: Mesa DRI Intel(R) 852GM/855GM x86/MMX/SSE2" - consider using the XRender compositing backend, it will likely get you the more reasonable performance.

The backtrace ends when uploading the window backing store image to the X11 server, ie. the Qt raster graphicssystem.
Try "systemsettings --graphicssystem native", but this is somewhere between Qt and X11 and since you mentioned not being able to run (GL) compositing and screensavers include GL calls as well... can you enable HW acceleration in gwenview? (settings/image view/animations: opengl) or does sth. simple as "glxgears" work?

luebking wrote:Try "systemsettings --graphicssystem native", but this is somewhere between Qt and X11 and since you mentioned not being able to run (GL) compositing and screensavers include GL calls as well...

That fixed it -- to a point. When I click test it crashes and it doesn't show the preview of the screensaver in the little monitor on the right.

luebking wrote:can you enable HW acceleration in gwenview? (settings/image view/animations: opengl) or does sth. simple as "glxgears" work?

Yes, both work.

P.S.: What does sth mean???

BTW: When I switched to XRender I was able to turn desktop effects on.

That fixed it -- to a point. When I click test it crashes and it doesn't show the preview of the screensaver in the little monitor on the right.

The screensaver will spawn a subprocess and afaik the graphicssystem is not inherited.
You can

Code: Select all

export QT_GRAPHICSSYSTEM=native

ie. from some executable ~/.kde/env/qt-graphicssystem.sh script, but:
* the native graphicssystem can be considerably slower
* i've seen it causing render glitches with transparency on an i810 chip.

This really seems like the behavior of the raster system exposes an issue in the X11 server, likely the IGP driver (xf86-video-intel) when there's an opengl context.

1. Try upgrading the driver or MESA (the OpenGL system)
2. if that's not possible or does not help, and you're only after screensavers, you could shadow /usr/bin/kscreensaver with /usr/local/bin/kscreensaver (or ~/bin/kscreensaver - anywhere up in $PATH will do) being a shell script and simply calling

Code: Select all

#!/bin/sh
/usr/bin/kscreensaver --graphicssystem native # use the absolute path to the binary to not create a shell bomb ;-)


3. globally

Code: Select all

export QT_GRAPHICSSYSTEM=native

as mentioned above, but be prepared for drawbacks


OT:
"sth." is an abr. for "something"

luebking wrote:

That fixed it -- to a point. When I click test it crashes and it doesn't show the preview of the screensaver in the little monitor on the right.

The screensaver will spawn a subprocess and afaik the graphicssystem is not inherited.
You can

Code: Select all

export QT_GRAPHICSSYSTEM=native

ie. from some executable ~/.kde/env/qt-graphicssystem.sh script, but:
* the native graphicssystem can be considerably slower
* i've seen it causing render glitches with transparency on an i810 chip.

This really seems like the behavior of the raster system exposes an issue in the X11 server, likely the IGP driver (xf86-video-intel) when there's an opengl context.

1. Try upgrading the driver or MESA (the OpenGL system)
2. if that's not possible or does not help, and you're only after screensavers, you could shadow /usr/bin/kscreensaver with /usr/local/bin/kscreensaver (or ~/bin/kscreensaver - anywhere up in $PATH will do) being a shell script and simply calling

Code: Select all

#!/bin/sh
/usr/bin/kscreensaver --graphicssystem native # use the absolute path to the binary to not create a shell bomb ;-)


3. globally

Code: Select all

export QT_GRAPHICSSYSTEM=native

as mentioned above, but be prepared for drawbacks


OT:
"sth." is an abr. for "something"

How would I go about upgrading the driver? I have never messed with linux drivers outside of Compat Wireless which I just followed the instructions on aircrack-ng.com so, I really have no idea of how to upgrade video drivers. Also when you said "or MESA" did you mean it as another word for driver or did you mean or upgrade that?

If this is a video problem, could that be what mucks up flash?

This could be relate dif HW accleration for flash is enabled (controllable via /etc/adobe/mms.cfg - just google for it on how to control the settings)

MESA is basically the the opensource OpenGL package. You'll esp. require "intel-dri" and "xf86-video-intel" (the X11 graphics driver)
If your distro has no updates for them, you could compile the resp. xorg package and MESA from the latest (stable) sources - that does not guarantee a fix, though.

Also if your distro still provides it (frankly: unlikely, except for Archlinux) you could try the old dri1 driver ("i810-dri")

luebking wrote:This could be relate dif HW accleration for flash is enabled (controllable via /etc/adobe/mms.cfg - just google for it on how to control the settings)

MESA is basically the the opensource OpenGL package. You'll esp. require "intel-dri" and "xf86-video-intel" (the X11 graphics driver)
If your distro has no updates for them, you could compile the resp. xorg package and MESA from the latest (stable) sources - that does not guarantee a fix, though.

Also if your distro still provides it (frankly: unlikely, except for Archlinux) you could try the old dri1 driver ("i810-dri")

When I used "apt-get install intel-dri xf86-video-intel" it said it was unable to locate the packages. It's late right now, but I will google it tomorrow. I use Linux Mint. I used Linux Mint 13 x86 non-pae then upgraded to Linux Mint 15 pae using fake-pae package. Anyway, I'll check into my graphics issues... It seems that it has nothing to do with KDE, just my graphics card drivers. Thanks for your help, I will probably make a post on ubuntu or mint forums.

apt-get update xserver-xorg-video-intel
ubuntu (thus mint) seems to have two mesa packages: libgl1-mesa-dri resp. libgl1-mesa-dri-experimental, they might however just be metapackages and the actual dri modules come with the drm packages (where the intel one is dependecy of the xserver package)

fooling around with pae incompatible packages /could/ be an issue here.
-> maybe try a live system from a distro with stock non-pae support.

mint seems to provide a 486 instead of 686 kernel for non-pae cpus, what costs you smp (though your cpu has only one core) and whatnot other capabilities of your cpu, what could easily cause a conflict with a drm module (from mesa) expecting a 686 kernel... (still as well it could be just lousy support for the dated 8xx chips which have pretty limited OpenGL capabilities anyway)

luebking wrote:apt-get update xserver-xorg-video-intel
ubuntu (thus mint) seems to have two mesa packages: libgl1-mesa-dri resp. libgl1-mesa-dri-experimental, they might however just be metapackages and the actual dri modules come with the drm packages (where the intel one is dependecy of the xserver package)

fooling around with pae incompatible packages /could/ be an issue here.
-> maybe try a live system from a distro with stock non-pae support.

mint seems to provide a 486 instead of 686 kernel for non-pae cpus, what costs you smp (though your cpu has only one core) and whatnot other capabilities of your cpu, what could easily cause a conflict with a drm module (from mesa) expecting a 686 kernel... (still as well it could be just lousy support for the dated 8xx chips which have pretty limited OpenGL capabilities anyway)

I know flash, desktop effects, and the screensaver part of system settings worked on linux mint 13 without a problem. I found an article on how the kernel for pae works perfectly fine on a non-pae system, but ubuntu (and mint) looks for the keyword pae in /proc/cpuinfo or whatever the file was.

The whole thing was I wanted KDE PIM 4.8+ for GroupDAV Ware resource (I think that's what the name was) so I could add Google calendar as a read-write calendar, but it wasn't available for precise and olivia. I tried using the raring repositories but I kept getting package clashing, so I tried installing KDE 4.10 from source but ran into a 10 foot wall of errors on Qt, SuperBuild, and the individual items. So when I found that article I was jumping through hoops, now I am having a hell of a time trying to get flash, desktop effects, and that particular part of system settings to work properly. I have the screensaver set manually and was able to run the command in the desktop file to set the settings for the screensaver without a problem, but the system settings is just bucking.

The particular issue is caused by some combination of the Qt graphicssystem and present OpenGL contexts (ie. faaaar below any appication code abstraction), but, as you noticed, what you try is not pain free (and likely never will if dri userspace part mismatches the kernel architecture)

I only can repeat the advice to try a distro with "legal" support for your architecture.

luebking wrote:The particular issue is caused by some combination of the Qt graphicssystem and present OpenGL contexts (ie. faaaar below any appication code abstraction), but, as you noticed, what you try is not pain free (and likely never will if dri userspace part mismatches the kernel architecture)

I only can repeat the advice to try a distro with "legal" support for your architecture.

What distros have nonpae + kde 4.8 or higher + apt support? By this point I don't care what I have to do, I just want everything to work. I want apt support because thats what kali repos are and I have my own apt repo. I also just found out about another non-functional thing: my dvd drive is not being detected. So please suggest away.