Everytime I start KDE it is a gamble whether the same startup options are applied or not.

- I explicitely set Yakuake as start program - it starts about 90% of the time ...

- sometimes the only symbol in the panel is the one for USB connections, no klipper, no lorganizer ...
(note that the next time I get the icons I have to reconfigure thier behaviour within the systray panel)

- sometimes akonadi doesn't start (really? I still haven't got used to that - what a nag I am)

- after flash freezes my xserver sometimes I have to cold reset cause keyboard stops working (one reason why the classic xserver is ****! - how can any system not be guarded against a screen freeze killing the input devices?). After this booting up again my last activity settings is corrupt and I have to reconfigure my wallpapers and desktop applets

Is there any way to save my start profile for easy recovery - I am so fed up with at least two years of redoihng stuff ...

frustrated,
piedro

after flash freezes my xserver sometimes I have to cold reset cause keyboard stops working (one reason why the classic xserver is ****! - how can any system not be guarded against a screen freeze killing the input devices?)

Because it doesn't - the bug is in the kernel module for the GPU, the kernel halts, that freezes X11 AND the input.

I am so fed up with at least two years of redoihng stuff

You're having those issues for two years?

- akonadi is triggered by processes using it (inc. iirc the digital clock plasmoid...), it's not supposed to start automatically
- how did you setup yakuake for autostart? "kcmshell4 autostart"?
- "no klipper, no korganizer" - those are independent processes, so whatever troubles yakuake may trouble them as well - but i don't understand "I have to reconfigure thier behaviour within the systray panel"

How is "kcmshell4 smserver" / "on login" configured?

Hi!

"Because it doesn't - the bug is in the kernel module for the GPU, the kernel halts, that freezes X11 AND the input."
Thx for clarifying this. So it's is more severe than I expected... Is there anything I can do about it?

What is your theory about how this effects the KDE start? Maybe I am naiv but shouldn't the files containing the start configuration be untouched by a crash of the GPU or the kernel? (as this happens in RAM not on disk as I imagine...)

"You're having those issues for two years?"
Yes. Maybe longer... Since KDE 4.4 I guess, I have to frequently reset the start configuration for KDE and/or the Plasma desktop activity running 4 individual desktops. the annoying part is that I don't change any settings and still, as you know, things sometimes crash and I have the resetting problem afterwards ...

"- akonadi is triggered by processes using it (inc. iirc the digital clock plasmoid...), it's not supposed to start automatically"
Yes, I know, but as the korganizer systray thingy is started and incoming emails show notifications anyway akonadi is started at KDE startup. You are probably right that from a technical standpoint this is not automatic. But it's running once KDE is up. I don't see your point here. What is your suggestion?

"- how did you setup yakuake for autostart? "kcmshell4 autostart"?"
As documentation tells me to: I open systemsettings > ... > Autostart and add an autostart application hwich creates a *.desktop file in the hidden autostart folder ... pls correct me if I am wrong here. These files are still there but seems they don't get used after crashing ...

"- "no klipper, no korganizer" - those are independent processes, so whatever troubles yakuake may trouble them as well - but i don't understand "I have to reconfigure thier behaviour within the systray panel" "
I am convinced you are right here. In the systray area I don't like the autohide behaviour of icons. So I have to configure the icons as "always show" - this way they don't disappear or slide around in the systray area which is a bit glitchy anyway, so this setting ensures I don't get the graphical symbol glitches like overlapping symbols, nonreadable clock and so forth .... These systray settings do not stick for some reason. Once I start KDE without the keyboard layout switcher for example I have to reconfigure it once it's started again. (imho, there should be a possibility to change the default setting for these symbols - now it's default is to set everything to "autohide" which I don't like at all....

How is "kcmshell4 smserver" / "on login" configured?
It is set to "start empty session" which starts an empty session with only the configured autostart applications starting (yakuake, dropboxd, a "noscreenblanking-after-10-min"-skript, the remmina-applet, and the HP Toolbox). Also I used to start the "remember the milk"-plasmoid with one desktop but this crashes plasma-desktop in many instances so I stopped using it for the moment. No other plasmoids or applets ...

I would be fine with a solution to backup the startup configuration and just replace it with a backup after a crash to fix it. I do not have faith we can avoid KDE crashing ...

thx for you helping,
piedro

The crashes i've encountered in the past 3-4 years were all due to my fault (in-development) ...

- Is /tmp and /var/run resp. /var/lock on a tempfs? (because of pot. lockfile leftovers)
- I'd try skipping all autostart processes and re-activating them one-by-one to see whether one of them causes the trouble. (and i'd frankly start with dropbox)
- Does remmia imply this is a remote desktop?

saving/restoring a config will certainly not help on failing autostarts.
you'll find those in ~/.kde/share/autostart resp. ~/.kde/env

loosing the autohide settings sounds like a bug in the systray or the systray is regenerated (ie. does not restore the configured one) - ie. you might eg. get a default panel instead of the one you configured?

a halted kernel (you'd not even get an echo when pinging the machine) is indeed a severe issue - what's the output of lspci?

I guess this may well be my mistake... though I never use the development version....

My /tmp is just the normal /tmp directory within the fileroot. there is no entry in fstab that indicates otherwise as far as I can tell.

I will follow your advice and restart all services one by one (I already have deleted and reset all start services and programs). Since last week I have had no failures up till now. Since I have done this procedure a few times within the last few month I am not yet conclusive whether this will solve it... but there's always hope

The remmina applet is just for support of other desktops, the one I am talking about is a standard local installation.

The systray settings stick well unless an applet or indicator is removed and added again. But when KDE starts without starting the systray applets I have to add them manually again and systray has forgotten their specified "hide/unhide/always-show/never-show "-settings. You are probalby right that this is a bit of a software design bug. This is just a minor nuisance...

my lspci output is:
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 4 Series Chipset DRAM Controller (rev 03)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 4 Series Chipset PCI Express Root Port (rev 03)
00:1a.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4
00:1a.1 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) USB UHCI Controller #5
00:1a.2 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) USB UHCI Controller #6
00:1a.7 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #2
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) HD Audio Controller
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) PCI Express Root Port 1
00:1c.4 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) PCI Express Root Port 5
00:1c.5 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) PCI Express Root Port 6
00:1d.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1
00:1d.1 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2
00:1d.2 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3
00:1d.7 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #1
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 PCI Bridge (rev 90)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801JIB (ICH10) LPC Interface Controller
00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) 4 port SATA IDE Controller #1
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) SMBus Controller
00:1f.5 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) 2 port SATA IDE Controller #2
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation G92 [GeForce 9800 GT] (rev a2)
02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 02)
03:00.0 IDE interface: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88SE6101/6102 single-port PATA133 interface (rev b2)
05:02.0 Multimedia audio controller: Creative Labs SB Live! EMU10k1 (rev 07)
05:02.1 Input device controller: Creative Labs SB Live! Game Port (rev 07)

In journalctl I only see failing entries about pulseaudio that seems to have been already started. The rest appears to be clear of errors.
(I think this should be harmless...)

thx for your efforts,
piedro

My /tmp is just the normal /tmp directory within the fileroot. there is no entry in fstab that indicates otherwise as far as I can tell.

See:

Code: Select all

grep tmp /etc/mtab

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation G92 [GeForce 9800 GT] (rev a2)

Check:

Code: Select all

dmesg | grep NVRM


Check if it says sth. like

Code: Select all

[   15.458823] NVRM: Your system is not currently configured to drive a VGA console
[   15.458830] NVRM: on the primary VGA device. The NVIDIA Linux graphics driver
[   15.458834] NVRM: requires the use of a text-mode VGA console. Use of other console
[   15.458838] NVRM: drivers including, but not limited to, vesafb, may result in
[   15.458841] NVRM: corruption and stability problems, and is not supported.


hmmm, I haven't had this now for two weeks ...

Now I lost all my activity settings for no apparent reason:

to the NVRM info you asked:

[ 23.617847] NVRM: loading NVIDIA UNIX x86_64 Kernel Module 334.21 Thu Feb 27 15:55:45 PST 2014

thx, p.

NOw after a proper reboot I lost all three of my activities again. To be precise: after a second reboot the activities reappeared though lost all settings, desktop backgrounds, miniprograms and atached plasmoids ... also there is another activity "new activity" which can't be deleted. Switching to the latter causes plasma-desktop to crash. FTER relogin the "new activity" disappeared ... also all the symbols in my systray panel.

Also I guess I found the culprit: it's nepomuk related again

seems like after every update or change to nepomuk (reinstallling, changing settings in systemsettings ...) crashes the plasma-desktop setup somehow ...

Probably I should give up here .... finding nepomuk errors related to kmail has been a nightmare and I don't have the time for it ...
thx for your time and efforts, I will stop customizing and using activities alltogether,

thx, piedro

Apologies you've had such problems - however application startup (Yakuake, etc) is completely unrelated to Nepomuk.
The problem sounds much wider in scope, I suspect a program is getting stuck during the startup process, preventing everything else from being started.

Can you try to reproduce those issues under a new user please?

thx for your attention, bcooksley!

Actually I recreated my user from scratch after the update to 4.13 which gets rid off the nepomuk stuff anyway ...
So now I will observe whether the issue still remains ... might take a while ... but I will report back when I feel sure about my statements with the new system ...

up till now (two days running) I haven't noticed any problems and the KDE start is much quicker also ...

thx for the moment,
best regards,
piedro

This seems to be fixed - the behaviour simply disappeared, as far as I can tell ...

thx for your help,
piedro

Okay, thanks for posting the update. My guess would be that a stale configuration file or application data somewhere in your profile was the cause of this issue.