So I recently switched from debian to arch, and while the distros themselves are different, they both use different versions of kde. Since most of my problems seem to be directly KDE related, I'm posting my questions here instead of the Arch forums.

1. In KDE 4.4 (when I was using debian), there was a package to configure samba in System Settings. In Arch, there doesn't appear to be anything related to a KDE (or even a Qt) samba config tool. Is this just Arch's fault, was that old package now obsolete, or is there an alternative? I really liked the config tool KDE 4.4 had.

2. The desktop (as folder view) is much glitchier than it was before. Some icons show up as a piece of paper with a question mark in it, even if I manually change them, and I can't move any icons at all. Clicking and dragging on an icon just shows the selection square. I tried creating a new folder view of a different folder and that didn't work either. This issue never happened to me before.

3. The printer section in System Settings doesn't let me add a printer.

4. I thought KDE 4.4 was somewhat of a CPU hog but 4.6 is even worse. I have a dual core CPU and the usage raised from about 6% on average to 11% minimum, for both cores. Also, my GPU usage raised from about an average of 4% to about 7%. Is there some reason this is happening? I don't really do many strenuous CPU tasks but this is really bad. I noticed that X seems to be where most of the CPU usage is going to, kwin itself takes up about 1-3% consistently.

5. Dolphin randomly takes a very long time to start up and crashes for no reason at all. I could just simply open up a folder with only 3 files in it and it crashes. When I used 4.4, dolphin really only crashed whenever I opened up folders with over 1000 files.


I really like the new features of KDE 4.6 but these issues should not be occuring on something this new.

1) Assuming you have the correct Samba dependencies present, and the appropriate packages are installed, it should be present. The Samba control module is located in Sharing > Samba in System Settings. The control module is part of the upstream "kdenetwork" module.

2) Please ensure shared-mime-info and oxygen-icons are installed. Ensure users can read and write to /var/tmp/ and /tmp. Also, try running "kbuildsycoca4 --noincremental". If these don't work, remove /var/tmp/kdecache-$USER outside KDE.

4) What graphics card do you have? You may find disabling Blur or the Lanczos filter by blacklisting it to help.

5) Please try using strace to monitor it's startup. Which directories do you have selected to be indexed in System Settings > Desktop Search? Are there any particular directories which reproducibly cause a crash? Some thumbnailers and metadata extractors have caused crashes in the past.

1) Try installing the

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kdenetwork-filesharing

package

bcooksley wrote:1) Assuming you have the correct Samba dependencies present, and the appropriate packages are installed, it should be present. The Samba control module is located in Sharing > Samba in System Settings. The control module is part of the upstream "kdenetwork" module.

Apparently I already had kdenetwork-filesharing installed but it wasn't working because I didn't have an existing smb.conf. To me, thats pretty dumb because its a tool designed to edit it, and typically tools that edit text files can create them as well. But, I copied the smb.conf.default and now its working.

2) Please ensure shared-mime-info and oxygen-icons are installed. Ensure users can read and write to /var/tmp/ and /tmp. Also, try running "kbuildsycoca4 --noincremental". If these don't work, remove /var/tmp/kdecache-$USER outside KDE.

I have both packages, and the icons exist. If I click on the desktop icons, the icon thats supposed to show up does for a second and then it goes back to the white question mark. Keep in mind, only 2 of my 29 desktop icons are doing this, but all of them, including things that aren't .desktop files, won't let me move them (and no I do not have locked widgets). I do have access to both of those folders and running "kbuildsycoca4 --noincremental" did not work.

4) What graphics card do you have? You may find disabling Blur or the Lanczos filter by blacklisting it to help.

I have a 7900GTO. I don't have lanczos turned on. Surprisingly, blur was enabled and I never knew it - it doesn't appear to have a very noticeable effect, but disabling it has drastically lowered CPU and GPU usage. CPU usage is slightly higher than before, but GPU usage is now normal.

5) Please try using strace to monitor it's startup. Which directories do you have selected to be indexed in System Settings > Desktop Search? Are there any particular directories which reproducibly cause a crash? Some thumbnailers and metadata extractors have caused crashes in the past.

Actually I should re-word what I said - it doesn't crash, it just freezes, so I'm not sure if strace will help. Unfortunately the results are not consistently reproducible and it doesn't matter which folder I go into. I have indexing completely disabled, and sometimes it locks up the second I open it. I have it start out viewing my home folder, which is pretty clean - I don't store pictures, videos, music, or documents on this computer. Dolphin is being updated the moment I'm making this post, so maybe that will fix it.

BTW, thanks for the helpful posts. So right now, my questions 2, 3, sort-of 4, and 5 are still up

ok so after the update, the icons are now working fine. kolourpaint is the only one that still shows the question mark but I suppose I can just re-create that icon if necessary.

X is still consuming a lot of CPU usage but thats not really a KDE problem. Kwin and plasma-desktop are both consuming at least 1% consistently, but I can deal with it.


So, that really just leaves me with my questions about the printer and dolphin locking up.


If anyone knows a way to improve Xorg's performance, that'd be great. If anyone is aware of why dolphin was locking up in the first place, I would like to know why.

2) Did you try removing /var/tmp/kdecache-$USER as suggested?

5) Try running Dolphin in Konsole, preferrably under strace, then when it freezes, attach gdb and generate a backtrace using "thread apply all bt". Pastebin both and post the links to them here.

Considering its just 1 icon thats getting issues, I honestly don't really care about it, because everything else on my desktop is now working just fine. I also managed to fix my printer problem - apparently cups wasn't added as a daemon in /etc/rc.conf.

I noticed now that dolphin only seems to lock up whenever I'm viewing folders with many thumbnails in them. I deleted the .thumbnails folder so I'll see if that fixes anything. Also I forgot to mention, it doesn't stay frozen, it eventually starts working again but it has at times taken as much as a full minute. Strangely, CPU and HDD usage aren't affected at all.

I gather Dolphin doesn't output anything to the console when it unfreezes? This is probably a D-Bus or external process hanging, leading to Dolphin locking up.

I have some issues also. This version of 4.6 seems quite buggy.

I've had my desktop crash many times (fortunately it reloads).

I can't move a file around on the desktop (folder view). I can select it but I can't grab it to drag. I can right click on it and choose menu entries. I can click and move a folder, just not a file. This is pretty annoying.

The popup portion of the notification area doesn't resize properly. If I start a task such as copying a file when I click to pop up the notification area parts are off to the right and below the viewable area. As well, as the copy process proceeds the notification messages flash (the notification message itself and the prior completed messages all flash). I'm using the default theme -- unaltered.

I've had some system tray icons that sit well in the tray suddenly pop up to the upper right hand corner of the screen. Most of the time the sys tray icon is fine.

The date format presented in the date/time widget of the main panel doesn't conform to the date format I choose in system settings.

jimbo99 - most of your issues seem to be plasma related, might you consider removing/renaming your plasmarc files and starting fresh?

these commands will do it:

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kquitapp plasma-desktop
sleep 20s
mkdir -p $HOME/plasma-config/
mv $(kde4-config --localprefix)/share/config/plasma-desktop* $HOME/plasma-config/
plasma-desktop &

That did not work and only accomplished wiping out the desktop along with all my custom settings. As well, now I can't move any icon around so everything is aligned to the left side (not where I want it). I also lost all my RSS feeds that I had in a widget.

jimbo99

No you haven't, they've been moved to ~/plasma-config - just put them back to ~/.kde4/share/config/

Strange that it didn't work, though. If I were you I'd repeat the procedure for all plasma* files in ~/.kde4/share/config/

Toad,

Thanks for the reply.

As far as following his suggestion goes, it would alarm the average user to find things messed up with their customization gone. I just put everything back, others wouldn't even know how to do that.

The cause of the crashes is still unknown, and he didn't address the date format issue at all.

As far as not being able to move the desktop icons around I've discovered the cause. My opinion is that the testers just didn't do proper testing to work it out. The problem is caused by selecting mouse "double click" in system settings.

Under system settings, input devices, mouse if you choose "double click" the problem occurs. Put it back to single click and the problem goes away. So, I can't select to grab and move files around the desktop because I chose the "double click" choice. I can repeat the behavior 100% of the time.

I can't stand single click, so I put it to double click. If I recall correctly, in the past, the developers have had some words about those that choose "double click", thus that's why they put it by default as "single click". Every other desktop manager that I've seen, as far as I recall, in all my years of computing, has double click as the default. Maybe if they'd put theirs at double click they'd have discovered the problem.

Well, google01103 suggested something and it didn't work. Shame, but he saw to it that no data was lost, so kudos to him (would you have thought of it?).

Other than that do not be surprised to not have all your problems sorted in one thread. It is generally a bad idea to include more than one problem per thread, a guideline you will find in almost all forums.

So my suggestion to you:

Make a list of your probs and describe each one in a thread of its own. Do not forget to give a proper description of the problem, note down what steps you have taken and perhaps even give an insight into your skill level.

That way you can be sure that each and every problem gets addressed

toad wrote:Well, google01103 suggested something and it didn't work. Shame, but he saw to it that no data was lost, so kudos to him (would you have thought of it?).

Stole it from an earlier thread (possibly theBlackCat or Bcooksley), it's good code to have available