About two weeks ago, I lost the ability to sort containers in KDE 4.4.5. That is to say, if I go into Dolphin and click on "Date", "Size", or "Name", it won't change the sort order of the list.

Yesterday I upgraded to KDE 4.5.1 and this behavior continues. Also, I think I'm missing some menus. Specifically, some applications will allow fields to be toggled on and off in a container by right clicking on a container title bar and selecting the fields from a pull down menu.

KTorrent will crash if I try click on some of the container field titles to sort the display in various ways. Dolphin will just ignore the clicks. Kontact will also ignore the clicks.

KDE 4.4.5 worked perfectly for a couple of months. This just started a couple of weeks ago.

I'd like to try blowing away part of my profile. I can't afford to delete it completely and start again but I wouldn't care if my customization settings were reset to the 4.5.1 defaults.

Thank you in advance for any insight.

I just tried creating a new user and logging in as that user. The behavior is the same. Containers still won't sort.

I'm using ArchLinux and I'm current as of yesterday afternoon.

When you say "containers", do you mean columns in the "details" or "list" view, or groups in a grouped view, or both? Have you tried sorting in dolphin using view->sort by?

TheBlackCat wrote:When you say "containers", do you mean columns in the "details" or "list" view, or groups in a grouped view, or both?

Both.

TheBlackCat wrote:Have you tried sorting in dolphin using view->sort by?

Not until just now. It works fine.

I thought I'd post an update to this situation in case someone finds this with a search and is trying to solve a similar problem.

I installed Ubuntu a few days ago and it's been running fine. At that time, I also installed a second RAID chassis with a bunch more disk. My old 7.5TB RAID5 array was formatted EXT3. That array is three years old. The new 8TB RAID5 array is formatted XFS. Yeah, it took a few days to copy one array to the other.

I ended up booting back into Arch/KDE to export some stuff and noticed containers sort and work perfectly when using the XFS copy of my home dirs. Mounting the EXT3 home dirs makes the containers fail to sort every time and XFS works perfectly every time.

... so I mounted the XFS home dirs and ran an 'fsck' against the EXT3 partition. It came up fairly clean. There were a few dozen inode issues that were repaired by hitting <enter>. Mounting the EXT3 home dirs after the fsck still causes containers to stop sorting.

I would recommend removing any .directory files on the ext3 array.