Hey all,

So i switched to KDE about a month ago after a long time with Gnome and i'm never going back to Gnome. But i'm having some problems which are becoming a real pain. First off, since upgrading to 4.2.1 last week, i've been getting really random black screens. Now i know other people have been having these issues and disabling 'present windows' fixes it, it does not work for me however.

First i thought it was a driver issue since i upgraded to 180.29-3, but i reverted back to 180.22-1 and i was still getting the same issue. And i was reading another solution was to use a keyboard shortcut to disable desktop effects and re-enable them. This is my second problem. My keyboard shortcuts do not work.

When i go into System Settings > Keyboard & Mouse > Global Keyboard Shortcuts i get this message:

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Failed to contact the KDE global shortcuts daemon
Message: Could not get owner of name 'org.kde.kded': no such name
Error: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NameHasNoOwner

I googled this (naturally) but can't find anything related to this error.

Another problem, i try to go into Service Manager and get this error:

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Unable to contact KDED.

Again, i googled this and tried restarting KDED and get this:

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$ kded --new-startup
FATAL: DCOP communication problem!
Aborted

So i'm not sure what is going on really and i don't want to format my system and start from scratch. I'm using Archlinux 64-bit. The black screen is the real problem, it's very random and a lot of times it just happens when i'm not near the machine. And anything i've found online relating to it doesn't work. The other issues aren't as severe but just annoying. I'm having to go back to Gnome when the black screens get too frequent and i hate it. I just want the stability i had over a week ago :'(

the usual suggestion:

create a new user and see if it has these issues - if so something is corrupted in ~/.kde4

turn off widow effects in systemsettings and restart kde4

rename the 2 plasma rc files and restart kde

are there newer versions of 4.2.1 to update? I'm running 4-4.2.1-103.3 and there might be newer available (each distro updates at diff times) if so try updating

In KDE 4, the KDE daemon process was renamed to "kded4"

Thanks for the help, it seems as though my latter 2 problems have been solved by creating a new user. And my black screen problem, i'm not sure of yet, but i'll put this as solved unless i have any problems

Ok the system seemed stable on a new account until earlier today when it black screened again. And just did so again 5 minutes ago. I have the 'Present Windows' option in Kwin turned off. Not sure what else i can do really, i'm not having any of the other problems i was having on my previous account. And disabling Kwin will kind of make KDE useless since the plasmoids etc depend on it

Given the nature of the KDE Daemon error message above, please ensure your KDE installation is fully up to date, and ensure you are using Qt 4.4, instead of 4.5.

I had qt 4.5 installed but downgraded to 4.4.

This didn't make a difference. I just tried to open SoundKonverter and got the black screen again :-S

Edit:
My system is also fully up to date.
It just black screened again. I tried what has been mentioned in other threads, Alt + Shift + F12 then repeat. That didn't fix the problem. Although bringing up run with Alt + F2 and typing 'plasma' fixed it. Kind of annoying to do this every half hour or so, any ideas what's causing the problem?

Also this doesn't seem the same as some other people have mentioned. It can happen to me when i'm doing nothing, just reading a website for example. Or a lot of times i'll come back from letting the system idle and it'll have black screened.

Are you using the latest NVidia drivers? If so, try downgrading to a previous revision.

Yeah i'm using 180.29-3 and have tried previous versions and still get the same error. And the drivers work fine in other DE's. The fact that i have to restart plasma when this happens kinda points towards a kde problem.

Can you reproduce under a new user?

Tried creating a new user, still getting the same issue. There's nothing i can do to trigger it, it seems really random.

I just got something from my logs right after it happened, not sure if it means much

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2009-03-18 23:39:02   archy   kernel   plasma[24308] trap stack segment ip:7fd7464ded1e sp:7fd62a350da0 error:0

mountainjew wrote:Tried creating a new user, still getting the same issue. There's nothing i can do to trigger it, it seems really random.

I just got something from my logs right after it happened, not sure if it means much

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2009-03-18 23:39:02   archy   kernel   plasma[24308] trap stack segment ip:7fd7464ded1e sp:7fd62a350da0 error:0

Finally someone that's having semi similar problems like me .
I can't use some of KHotKeys; see a thread here for details.
And my plasma does go half blank sometime. It's not that it would completely dissapear.
More that some parts disappear. I just do:

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kquitapp plasma
and
plasma&

And it works again.
It's good to have Yakuake installed and running to repair this swiftly when it happens.
Hope that helps just a bit.

I got my hotkeys problem solved by creating a new user

I think i might have solved the black screen/plasma crash. I was using qt 4.4.3 and somebody at the chakra forum suggested using qtmod 4.4.3 instead. Seems to be working so far

I found the problem. It was the Yasp wireless plasmoid causing the crashes. Removed it and hasn't crashed since. Thanks for the help :shade: