hi

I run KDE 4.9.3 and encounter i bizzare problems. I can start KDE, use all apps but after a while dolphin, krusader, kwrite, kate, kile and majority off kde applications for some reason stopps to work. Konsole and yakuakke still works. xsession-errors showes nothing. In order to get things back to normal i have to reboot (log out and login are not enough - kde won't start). qdbus works and I can run everything just fine as root.

This drives me crazy and keeps me away from doing my job. I have no idea what to do besides moving away ~/.kde4 (I don't want to lose my config).

Help me please.

PS
Renaming ~/.kde4 didn't helped.

after a little more testing i founded out that

kwrite, kate, kile, okular, dolphin, krusader, rekonq, konversation and others - does not start at all
kopete, basket, calligra ─ starts but does not work, window is empty
akregator, konsole, yakuake, systemsettings, ark, kmag, kolourpaint, kid3 ─ works but open/save file dialog hangs application
ktorrent ─ starts but hangs just after that

so this looks like this: everything is going fine and after any hour or maybe two something happens and applications missbahave like i wrote above. Veeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeery frustrating. Still no idea what happens.

can you create a new user and see if it experiences the same

if you start ksysguard does the cpu and ram columns look ok?

2 thing to try:
1) with your KDE session not running erase your KDE cache folder /var/tmp/kdecach-user_name
2) within KDE session run

Code: Select all

kbuildsycoca4 --noincremental

Yes, I can

But before doing this i think that I possibly figured out the problem. I moved /tmp to /home/tmp (limited disk space on root) and symlinked /tmp to /home/tmp. I forgot about /var/tmp and ~/.kde4/ stuff. I will try to correct this when i go home.

If this is the reason then once again it will be easy to see that I am my own worst enemy.

EDIT
Still no joy. Will try to your sugestions. The problem is that it takes some time to get to the point when things are broken so it's quite hard to find out the reason.

ksysguard tells me nothing interesting. your suggestions didn't helped. Trying a new user now.

Gosh, this is the most cryptic and annoying problem i ever encountered on KDE.

EDIT
Finally I have some kind of error in log file:
QDBusConnection: session D-Bus connection created before QCoreApplication. Application may misbehave.
i can't log out. It looks quite the same as in viewtopic.php?f=111&t=102765 but happens only after some time, not directly after starting new kde session.

A shot in the dark : aren't your RAM and swap getting full after a while ? Are the permissions correctly set in /tmp ?

swap and ram are fine. I can use firefox and all non kde apps. tmp is chmoded 777 so it should be fine.

If you run one of the applications which refuses to start from Konsole, do you get any output which may be relevant?
Also, which graphics card + driver are you using?

No, no errors. Only dbus related but not always. I don't think it's problem related to the hardware ─ I have nvidia 7300 gt (I don't have newest kernel and x.org) and when I made a news user it works just fine.

Actually that's how i solved the issue: I just copied some most important settings and voila ─ it's ok.

Thank you for help.

No it's not ok. It still happens! I'm despaired.

when you tested the new user, did you test long enough? as you posted it was fixed by copying some files and then it went bad

I think it's important to determine if the issue is your account or all accounts

google01103 you were right. I didn't test long enough I guess. But thanks to you I was able to solve the issue and it was not KDE related.

In the system cron I had some pclinuxos jobs. Some was related to cleaning /tmp and I suspected that it can be reason behind the problem. Bingo! After turning it all off suddenly everything works again!

It worked ok before i moved /tmp to /home, I didn't look closely so not sure what actually happend but It's working good now so who cares?

Thank you all. You are awesome. Kudos for the man behind cron kcm module - it's very handy and makes life easier.

I will mark this as solved.

Just adding some detail here - KDE uses /tmp to store some temporary data (not so important) as well as sockets used to communicate with core processes such as ksmserver, kdeinit and klauncher (extremely important).

Without access to kdeinit4 and klauncher (responsible for launching applications, KIO slaves and a few other things) then it is no longer possible for a KDE application to function. Usually this would be resolved by automatically launching them - but this will fail as they are already running. KSMServer is responsible for session management.

I was looking into the same problem with my OpenSUSE 12.2 system. Yesterday, I began to slowly lose the ability to start programs. When I logged out then back in things generally worked for awhile then I would begin to lose the ability to start applications. Today no apps would start at all. I tried the solution proposed above (google1103) with deleting the /var/tmp/kdecache-user_name and kbuildsycoca4 --noincremental. Prior to doing the kbuildsyscoca4 applications would start, after the kbuildsyscoca4 apps again won't start. I got many error messages with the most common being along the line of Kbuildsysconca4(9403)/kdecore (services) KServicePrivate::init: The desktop entry file "/usr/share/applications/YaST2/kerberos.desktop" has Type= "Application" but also has a X-KDE-Library key. This Works for now, but makes user-preference handling difficult, so support for this might be removed at some point. Consider splitting it into two desktop files."

Everything still works fine under LXDE. As I check further, I see I can open one App under KDE. If one has been started, I can't open any others. Ideas anyone? Any suggestions/assistance will be appreciated.
Thanks,

can you create and login as a new user to see if this is a system wide or user specific issue

kde 4.10 or 4.9.x?

recently upgraded?