Hi,

I'm sitting on a private network where I'm using 6 computers. All the computers use LDAP login to a central server so that my family members and I can use any one of them. The home disk is also on the server and mounted during tha login procedure.

An anoyng thing that we see all the time is that when we switch between computers we get a KDE popup saying something like (Translated from Norwegian...)
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Sound units removed

KDE discovered that one or more sound units was removed

Do you want KDE to forget these units forever?
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And then a long list of units.

It seems like KDE is storing the previously used sound units used on the users home area. If so, then that is not very ok when working on a network with a number of different computers......

Is there anyone who can aid me in finding the root of this annoying issue?



Kind regards

KDE stores Phonon data in several locations. You will need to create a place on each machine where some machine specific settings can be stored, then moving each of the files / folders there, leaving behind symlinks so applications can access the data.

The files / folders are as follows:

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~/.kde4/share/config/phonondevicesrc
~/.config/kde.org/

Note that if your systems are Pulseaudio enabled, then including ~/.pulse in the list would also be a good idea.

Thank you for the reply.

It does not sound very user friendly if this has to be done manually. Earlier there has been directories like /tmp/kde-username and /var/tmp/kdecache-username that is machine specific.

I did find this /var/tmp/kdecache-username on the latest openSUSE install and it has a libphonon/hardwaredatabase file in it. It's a binary file with lots of stuff in it

Still the pop-up appeares.....

Kind regards

That is correct, because the data specified in those two files I specified contain preferences ( as set in System Settings > Multimedia ), and hence must be preserved.

The libphonon/hardwaredatabase file is simply a cache of information about the system audio hardware so that HAL is not being aggressively queried by multiple Phonon applications.

bcooksley wrote:That is correct, because the data specified in those two files I specified contain preferences ( as set in System Settings > Multimedia ), and hence must be preserved.

The libphonon/hardwaredatabase file is simply a cache of information about the system audio hardware so that HAL is not being aggressively queried by multiple Phonon applications.

Ok, thanks again.
Would it then be possible to automagically store the user preferences related to HW in the same /var/tmp/libphonon structure and then avoid all this on networked systems?

If so, then is that something I can set up my self or is it the distro that needs to look in to this? Or Phonon?

Kind regards

Whilst it isn't automagic, running the following commands as each user should sort the issue.

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mv ~/.kde4/share/config/phonondevicesrc /var/tmp/kdecache-$(id -un)/libphonon/
ln -s /var/tmp/kdecache-$(id -un)/libphonon/phonondevicesrc ~/.kde4/share/config/phonondevicesrc
mv ~/.config/kde.org/libphonon.conf /var/tmp/kdecache-$(id -un)/libphonon/
ln -s /var/tmp/kdecache-$(id -un)/libphonon/libphonon.conf ~/.config/kde.org/libphonon.conf

Thank you for your time and kind reply.

Would it be correct to file this as a bug report towards the distro? Or is this something to discuss with the Phonon team?

Kind regards

This is something that needs to be resolved by the Phonon team. Support needs to be added to seperate the settings on a per host basis.