Hi all,

Till yesterday I was a very happy user of Kubuntu 13.04 and 12.04.3 LTS, which were dual booting on my thinkpad X1, and running as smooth as it can get with KDE 4.10.5. One of my major sources of joy was the use of activities. After trying these I was amazed how could anyone use a desktop environment without these facilities - very well done job KDE community! And thus my desperation with the results of my unfortunate upgrade to 4.11.1

My path/problem is very similar to a post I found here viewtopic.php?f=111&t=117085, tough the effects are different.

What I did:
- I add both Kubuntu 13.04 and 12.04.3 LTS dual booting and running smoothly
- I used kubuntu-ppa/backports to upgrade to 4.11.1 on the 13.04 installation. Everything installed without an issue or error.
- After reboot I found out that activities were not working. How did I conclude that? i) The folder views that I had associated with the 3 activities I had and setup to show files related to the current activity were empty; ii) in Dolphin when I tried to associate any file or folder to an activity through the entry with the right button menu, nothing happened, neither in folder view, nor in the menu, because if I repeated the process on the same file/folder, there was no option to unlink the file/folder from the current activity, it was like the previous action did nothing; iii) I had thunderbird and chrome set up with window rules that forced them to be present in all activities and desktops - I could not see them in any activity/desktop, though through top I could see they were running; iv) I had defined a few virtual folders through nepomuk on dolphin that allowed me to easily find files and folders related to some tag/activity (following these tips http://www.muktware.com/5574/few-plasma-desktop-tips) - they stopped working.

So I got really desperate as these were the features I really loved in KDE. So I tried to downgrade to 4.10.5 doing:
sudo apt-get install -y ppa-purge
sudo ppa-purge ppa:kubuntu-ppa/backports
sudo apt-get autoremove

During this process there were lots of questions that I was too lazy to read and accepted the default answer (how I regret that!) In the end, after rebooting, I was left with a black screen - it didn't even reached lightdm (which I was using instead of kdm). This happened in the Kubunt 13.04 installation so I rebooted into 12.04.3 and there I was with my stable 4.10.5. Unfortunately, I was stupid enough to repeat the upgrade process in this installation. The end result was the same - no activities. However, this time I did not follow the downgrade path.

Anyway after a lot of command line stuff I manage to recover my 13.04 installation to put it back again to 4.11.1, though with the same activities problems.

In summary, right now I have my laptop with two installations of Kubuntu with KDE 4.11.1, but without my loved activities on both. If anyone has any suggestion on how I could solve this issue I would be very, very grateful.

Thank you

can you create and test a new user to see if it's your config that's the issue?

I would also do the usual:
1) with you logged out of KDE remove your KDE cache /var/tmp/kdecache-user_name
2) within KDE run: kbuildsycoca4 --noincremental 2> /dev/null

I've created a new user and logged in. Created a folder view and opened Dolphin using the right click menu to access the activities menu. Selected the current activity and nothing happened in the folder view widget (even after refresh with F5). Tried again and suddenly it worked. Tried a few more times and always worked at first time. Still, I'm unable to reverse the association to the activity! There is no "unlink from current activity" option on the activities menu, as there was in 4.10.5 ... so mixed feelings with the new user....

Then I tried your other suggestions for my user:
- Logged out and removed my cache.
- Log in again and nothing changed. Run the kbuildsycoca4 command and nothing changed again.

In summary, this seems to be a problem with my user, in spite of the problem of unlinking missing on the new user. Still, with my user I was not able to make any progress at all

Thank you for your help. Any further suggestions?

not something I use but I can say that I can link but can't seem to unlink a file from an activity, tried but could not find a bug report on it

is Nepomuk running? not file indexing, just Nepomuk? if not enable and then restart KDE

is kactivitymanagerd running?

in Dolphin settings under services is "file to activity linking plugin" enabled?

google01103 wrote:not something I use but I can say that I can link but can't seem to unlink a file from an activity, tried but could not find a bug report on it

is Nepomuk running? not file indexing, just Nepomuk? if not enable and then restart KDE

Yes, it is running, and it would be surprising if the upgrade switched off these services no?

latop:~$ ps axu | grep nepomuk
xyz 2226 0.0 0.1 231316 11740 ? Sl Set17 0:00 /usr/bin/nepomukserver
xyz 2229 0.0 0.2 371520 23172 ? SNl Set17 0:00 /usr/bin/nepomukstorage
xyz 4704 0.0 0.0 9444 956 pts/2 S+ 09:43 0:00 grep --color=auto nepomuk

laptop:~$ ps axu | grep kactivity
xyz 2126 0.0 0.2 902252 23044 ? Sl Set17 0:00 /usr/bin/kactivitymanagerd
ltorgo 4707 0.0 0.0 9444 964 pts/2 S+ 09:43 0:00 grep --color=auto kactivity

Thanks

google01103 wrote:is kactivitymanagerd running?

in Dolphin settings under services is "file to activity linking plugin" enabled?

Yes, they are.

Just to make a guess, do the "old" activities not even show up if you bring the "activity controller" (meta+Q shortcut) up?

einar wrote:Just to make a guess, do the "old" activities not even show up if you bring the "activity controller" (meta+Q shortcut) up?

No, no, they are there, as they are also present in the Activity Bar Widget I have at the top of my screen. Keyboard shortcuts that I've defined for switching between activities also work perfectly well. Moreover, if I go to the top left icon of any opened window and change the activity where the window should appear - it works.

So it seems the non-working stuff is only related with file management and shows off on both the folder view widget and also in the file/folder association to activities in Dolphin...

Thanks again for your effort.

From what I can tell (I've run into the same bugs that ltorgo describes - kubuntu 12.04, after upgrading KDE from 4.10.5 to 4.11.1), there are 3 bugs at play:
* Files associated with an activity can't be unassociated
* Folder view widget bugs when showing files associated with the current activity (the second option in the Location settings page)
* A bug in the rule to associate windows/applications with all activities that causes the window to be inaccessible from any activity.

With regard to the first bug: associating files with activities works and can be verified by using the activities:/ kio which lists each activity and any files that have been associated with it. The Current Activity virtual directory also works as expected, listing the files associated with the current activity. The problem seems to be that the plugin which displays the menu for associating files with activites isn't recognizing that any files have been associated with any activities.

With regard to the second bug: When I first set up a folder view widget (in the panel so it appears on all activities) and tell it to show files related to the current activity it does so; but then when I get to switching activities then it continues to display the files from the first activity. Eventually, something refreshes but it ends up displaying nothing. This may be a bug in the implementation of the Files for Current Activity in KIO (I noticed something that may be related when a pointing a dolphin window to activities:/current/ and associating it with multiple activities: it wouldn't update the listing, event when hitting F5)

After running into that last bug with the association rule and ended up removing all window rules. Just now, I tried reproducing this bug by using the title-bar menu to associate the window with all activities and by setting up a rule to force windows of a given application on all windows, but in both attempts I was unable to reproduce the bug. More investigation may be required to see if it was just a matter of translating between the 4.10 and 4.11 versions of some config, or if it occurs consistently on log-in, or if there is some other trigger.

All other activity-related functions (that I use/pay attention to) seem to be working as expected

I think there are slight differences from my case and the case of airdrik.

airdrik wrote:
With regard to the first bug: associating files with activities works and can be verified by using the activities:/ kio which lists each activity and any files that have been associated with it. The Current Activity virtual directory also works as expected, listing the files associated with the current activity.

That is not the case with me. If I open activities:/ in Dolphin I see the folders of my 3 activities and the one of the current activity, but all of them are as empty as are my folder view widgets.

airdrik wrote:
With regard to the second bug: When I first set up a folder view widget (in the panel so it appears on all activities) and tell it to show files related to the current activity it does so; but then when I get to switching activities then it continues to display the files from the first activity.

Again that is not the case with me, though I've used the folder view widgets on the desktop and not on the panel. Still, they show me nothing. Nevertheless, as I've mentioned before, when I created a new user, I was able to see the files that I associated with an activity in the folder view widget...

airdrik wrote:
After running into that last bug with the association rule and ended up removing all window rules. Just now, I tried reproducing this bug by using the title-bar menu to associate the window with all activities and by setting up a rule to force windows of a given application on all windows, but in both attempts I was unable to reproduce the bug. More investigation may be required to see if it was just a matter of translating between the 4.10 and 4.11 versions of some config, or if it occurs consistently on log-in, or if there is some other trigger.

Again a slight difference here regarding the window rules. After deleting the rules and re-creating them again, this association with activities automagically works again as expected...

ltorgo wrote:I think there are slight differences from my case and the case of airdrik.

airdrik wrote:
With regard to the first bug: associating files with activities works and can be verified by using the activities:/ kio which lists each activity and any files that have been associated with it. The Current Activity virtual directory also works as expected, listing the files associated with the current activity.

That is not the case with me. If I open activities:/ in Dolphin I see the folders of my 3 activities and the one of the current activity, but all of them are as empty as are my folder view widgets.

airdrik wrote:
With regard to the second bug: When I first set up a folder view widget (in the panel so it appears on all activities) and tell it to show files related to the current activity it does so; but then when I get to switching activities then it continues to display the files from the first activity.

Again that is not the case with me, though I've used the folder view widgets on the desktop and not on the panel. Still, they show me nothing. Nevertheless, as I've mentioned before, when I created a new user, I was able to see the files that I associated with an activity in the folder view widget...

Ok, so your problem seems to be something preventing the associations from being created. I just verified that I can associate files with a certain activity and they do show up in the appropriate folder in the activities:/ kio in dolphin. However, as I mentioned, it doesn't allow me to remove those associations.

ltorgo wrote:

airdrik wrote:
After running into that last bug with the association rule and ended up removing all window rules. Just now, I tried reproducing this bug by using the title-bar menu to associate the window with all activities and by setting up a rule to force windows of a given application on all windows, but in both attempts I was unable to reproduce the bug. More investigation may be required to see if it was just a matter of translating between the 4.10 and 4.11 versions of some config, or if it occurs consistently on log-in, or if there is some other trigger.

Again a slight difference here regarding the window rules. After deleting the rules and re-creating them again, this association with activities automagically works again as expected...

I guess I wasn't clear about that - in my case after re-creating the rules they are working as expected as well, so the bug may have only existed in 4.11.0 or only affects all-activity associates created prior to 4.11.