Ever since I tried migrating Kontact from my old SSD to this one, it's been quirky: missing notes, message windows that sometimes scroll/sometimes don't/other times only scroll when you're looking at a different message, random crashes with no error message, the same 24 emails being downloaded over and over again, but not the ones before or after them, etc.

So, realizing that this is a shopping list and vague, I want to try to break it down and get more specifics before asking for help, but I need help to do even that.

First, when I start Kontact from a command line, there are a ton of messages being spit out as it runs. I want to be able to put those messages in a text file so I can edit out the redundant stuff (there are hundreds of "QFont::setPixelSize: Pixel size <= 0 (0)" for example) before paring it down to a few that look like they may be relevant to some of the specific quirks I'm trying to fix.

I have tried : kontact >kontact.errors.txt, and kontact >>kontact.error.txt thinking that either of these would direct either these messages to a text file. Neither produces any output, but the messages on-screen (in the terminal) continue. Is copying and pasting the only way of saving these? I'm concerned about some possibly relevant messages being pushed out of the scroll buffer by the large number of redundant messages.

I'm not familiar with the Linux logging system; where would the most relevant logs for kontact be? For that matter, is there a way to set a specific log file for kontact? kontact --help doesn't seem to indicate there is, so I'm just asking in case there's another way...

Hello Legomaniac!

Did you try to redirect standard error to a file?
I.e.:

Code: Select all

kontact 2>errors.txt

Thanks for the help. I'd always been under the impression that ">>" referred to the standard error path, hence I thought "kontact >>kontact.errors.txt" would have worked, but I see that should have been "kontact 2>kontact.errors.txt"

So, while that worked, since I originally posted the question, kontact has stopped working entirely. It no longer opens and no longer produces the stream of errors that I originally referred to. The one and only error now is:

KSycoca unavailable. Kontact will be unable to find plugins.

whereupon Kontact closes and I can no longer access Kontact (and hence, my contact list).

So now, as I write this, I've just discovered something: I went and started kmail separately and can access my messages but now, seemingly as a result, kontact will start up. Closing both and attempting to re-start kontact opens kontact and kmail sepatately. While kontact will allow me to access my contacts, the mail tab shows nothing, although this may be because kmail was launched simultaneously and is, at this point, still running. I repeated this several times (shutting both down and restarting Kontact which brings both up separately).

So now I tried a re-boot and kontact is working normally again, with the mail in it's appropriate tab and no error messages at all.

The second odd behaviour is that, previously, when I was getting all those error messages, I was starting kontact from a terminal command line and it behaved as such. That is to say, I would not get returned to the command line until Kontact was closed, during which time, the above mentioned error messages would scroll by.
Now, when I start Kontact at the command line, Kontact starts apparently as a separate process (as opposed to a child process) and I get returned to the command line with Kontact now running independently: if I close the terminal, Kontact remains running. I suppose this may also account for why I don't see any error messages any more although the behaviour of repeatedly downloading the same email over and over again is continuing.

kontact 2>kontact.errors.txt

now produces an empty file.
This thing is possessed.