Hi all,

I'm running kde 4.6 on kubuntu 10.10. Very weird problem. Plasma desktop apparently crashed in mid-session and got replaced by a gnome desktop (brown background with icons, right click gives the gnome desktop menu, though it seems to use a qt theme due to Clearlooks not being installed. The kde panels however remain, and when I switch to the other workspaces, they run the plasma desktop just nicely. Switching to another activity: same thing, my third workspace is gnome,the rest plasma. This happened a few times, so it's not a one time crash, and always in the workspace where I'm running firefox. Now, the upgrade to 4.6 did not go smoothly on kubuntu, as the packages were seriously borked, so that may have something to do with it, but even given that, this is seriously strange! Any ideas?

Sounds like you ran nautilus (gnome's file manager) somewhen, which by default will create a (gnome) desktop background if it is not already running (it doesn't try to detect if plasma is running). Plasma didn't crash, it is just hiding underneath the desktop 'window' that was created by nautilus (iirc, you can even move that window around using alt+click-and-drag, and close it when it has focus by hitting alt+f4).

To avoid this, make sure if you run nautilus to include the --no-desktop option (by adding it to the nautilus shortcut) so that it won't do that.

Awesome! Most likely firefox started nautilus when I opened the containing directory of a downloaded file, that would explain it. I should check the preferred programs firefox uses to deal with various file types, it seems that the default install doesn't really play nice with kde all that much. And uninstall nautilus, don't know how that got installed anyway. Thx!

iskendar wrote:And uninstall nautilus, don't know how that got installed anyway. Thx!

I wouldn't be surprised if firefox had a dependency on gnome-packages that pulled nautilius from the repos.

Kryten2X4B wrote:

iskendar wrote:And uninstall nautilus, don't know how that got installed anyway. Thx!

I wouldn't be surprised if firefox had a dependency on gnome-packages that pulled nautilius from the repos.

I don't believe Firefox depends on Nautilus or GNOME dependencies that will eventually pull in Nautilus. The dialogue you see with Firefox (File > Open or File > Save) is the generic GTK file chooser. This is replaced by Dolphin if you're using the openSUSE-patched Firefox under KDE.

Not by itself, no, but a packaging mistake may cause it. I've seen it before, but admittedly quite a while ago (Firefox 2.x something. Don't remember which distro). It was something like Depends on: gnome-desktop in that case so it wanted to pull in quite a lot of Gnome-related stuff.