Hello,
I upgraded my laptop (Dell XPS L701X) from FC14/Gnome to FC16/KDE, and the experience is significantly worse. Specifically, I have the following three issues:

1) Using an external display or projector
The Dell connects via an Apple Mini Displayport adaptor. In FC14/Gnome, this worked faultlessly. Now, 90% of the time I make the connection, the display freezes completely (and recovers when the adaptor is pulled out again). Sometimes the output display works after several reattempts (and then works fine), but I cannot reproduce success reliably.

2) Speakers do not disconnect when headphones plugged in
Again, this worked perfectly under FC14/Gnome. Now the only way I can stop the speakers producing sound is to use "alsamixer -c0" and manually change the volume settings. I have the latest version of Alsa.

3) After shutting and opening the case, KDE hangs for 5 minutes (I can use windows but cannot navigate using the panel or task manager)

Can anyone suggest any fixes for the above? I have extensively searched the internet and cannot find anything satisfactory.

Many thanks,
Edwin

For 2) this is likely a regression in ALSA itself - KDE is not responsible for the handling of actions such as the disconnection of inbuilt speakers when headphones are connected.

You may be able to enable some quirks - you will need to Google for these unfortunately, they are often specific to not only certain audio cards, but certain models of systems.

For 1) if you connect to the system remotely over SSH, and you acertain if the system has correctly detected the connection of the external screen?

For 3) can you verify that it is Plasma which has frozen? If so, which applets have you added? In particular, this is for applets which use network services or 3rd party applets.

Thanks for your reply.

Re 1), the system correctly detects the connection of the external screen, as it pops up a dialog box and opens the display configuration. It's when the display is then reconfigured that the freeze occurs. Would it help to give a precise sequence of events?

Re 3), I'm not sure how to verify it's Plasma that has frozen? The system is running /usr/bin/plasma-desktop. I can navigate desktops via keyboard shortcuts during the freeze.
I haven't added any applets really; I have a panel at the side of the screen with a pager and some icons/shortcuts, but other than that the configuration is out of the box.

The best way to verify that it is Plasma which has frozen would be by using KRunner (Alt + F2) to launch another application such as KWrite and verifying that it shows up properly on screen and is usable.

When frozen, I can't launch KRunner (either via Alt+F2 or via a terminal), but I can launch KWrite from a terminal and I can confirm it shows up and is usable. KRunner appears only when the session has unfrozen itself. I also get this warning from KRunner (whether or not the session is frozen): "QDBusConnection: session D-Bus connection created before QCoreApplication. Application may misbehave." (which I suspect is a red herring)


However, it's issue "(1) Using an external display or projector" which is causing me the most grief as I cannot reliably give presentations. There cannot be a hardware issue as it worked perfectly under FC14/Gnome. Please can anyone help?

Open System Settings > Startup & Shutdown > Service Manager. Uncheck "Display Management change monitor". Make sure to "Stop" it as well to be sure, then logout and back in again.

System wide services will not be affected or listed by this - these are KDE Desktop Services being referred to here.

To follow up on this thread in case the information is useful to anyone else

(a) I fixed my speaker/headphone issue by discovering a hidden option in alsamixer -- the "auto-mute" facility had been disabled. Not sure why this was the default in Fedora 16!
(b) I have not resolved the KDE lock-up issues -- the system (presumably Plasma) freezes both when losing network connectivity (probably due to mounted drives) and when trying to use an external display. I have now given up and am using XFCE instead which works perfectly.