Running KDE 4.4.5 on Mandriva 2012.2

This morning, seemingly without warning, KDE started exhibiting a long period of apparent inactivity on both startup and shutdown. Eventually, the handy little KNotifier crash dialog appears, complaining about a bus error that seems to be related to audio.

Detailed crash dump:

Code: Select all

Application: KNotify (knotify4), signal: Bus error
[KCrash Handler]
#5  0x00007f5b114302df in ?? () from /usr/lib64/libgstreamer-0.10.so.0
#6  0x00007f5b1143186f in ?? () from /usr/lib64/libgstreamer-0.10.so.0
#7  0x00007f5b11452784 in gst_registry_binary_read_cache () from /usr/lib64/libgstreamer-0.10.so.0
#8  0x00007f5b1142fa0e in gst_update_registry () from /usr/lib64/libgstreamer-0.10.so.0
#9  0x00007f5b113e6a85 in ?? () from /usr/lib64/libgstreamer-0.10.so.0
#10 0x00007f5b19481ff9 in g_option_context_parse () from /usr/lib64/libglib-2.0.so.0
#11 0x00007f5b113e61d5 in gst_init_check () from /usr/lib64/libgstreamer-0.10.so.0
#12 0x00007f5b11c7daea in ?? () from /usr/lib64/kde4/plugins/phonon_backend/phonon_gstreamer.so
#13 0x00007f5b11c7dfc3 in qt_plugin_instance () from /usr/lib64/kde4/plugins/phonon_backend/phonon_gstreamer.so
#14 0x00007f5b12359582 in ?? () from /usr/lib64/kde4/plugins/phonon_platform/kde.so
#15 0x00007f5b12359aab in ?? () from /usr/lib64/kde4/plugins/phonon_platform/kde.so
#16 0x00007f5b1e26cca6 in ?? () from /usr/lib64/libphonon.so.4
#17 0x00007f5b1e26e907 in Phonon::Factory::backend(bool) () from /usr/lib64/libphonon.so.4
#18 0x00007f5b1e26ed40 in ?? () from /usr/lib64/libphonon.so.4
#19 0x00007f5b1e266ae6 in ?? () from /usr/lib64/libphonon.so.4
#20 0x00007f5b1e264358 in ?? () from /usr/lib64/libphonon.so.4
#21 0x000000000040c931 in _start ()


My first thought was to Google for libgstreamer "bus error", limiting the search to the last year. A whopping 4 hits came back and the closest any of them came to a solution was a hack that involved creating a new user. (For diagnostic purposes, I did in fact create a new user, and, sure enough, the problem disappeared. But again, this approach strikes me more as a ham-handed hack than a true surgical solution.)

I found another posting that suggested deleting all the kdecache files. So I tried that, but the problem persists. On the off chance that it might be some sort of odd permissions problem, I also reset all file permissions in my /home directory.

The fact that the problem does not occur in a new user account makes me think that it is most probably an artifact of a FUBARed config file. But whether the issue is an extraneous file, a missing file, or a garbled file is unclear to me.

I freely confess that I know diddly about Linux audio. I do take note of the fact that exactly coincident with the appearance of this problem, neither the startup nor the shutdown sound plays.

I will happily RTFM/STFW if someone could suggest some alternate search terms.

rm -rf ~/.gstreamer-0.10

immediate guess: your cache has gone whoops

That fixed the problem!

Many thanks for the quick and helpful reply.