Hi,

My Plasma desktop seems to be hiding all of the windows of running applications as well as panels; they just don't show up. Widgets show up as normal, and I can right click on the desktop to add new widgets and 'run command' to start an application, but as soon as I do, the window dissapears. I can cycle through the windows by using alt-tab, and doing so will show the windows as they cycle, but as soon as I select a window, they will all dissapear again.

Interestingly, if I use 'run command', I can bring up the system monitor, and this window DOES show up and behave normally. In this way I can kill the plasma process, and doing so will cause all of my windows to show up again, albeit at the cost of not having the desktop running. If I use the konsole to restart plasma-desktop, my panels show up for a split second and then everything dissapears again.

I am using a two-week-old install of Linux Mint 12 KDE version, but this has happened to all distros I've ever tried that use KDE 4. They will work for a little while, then spontaneously, this problem will occur. In the past I just switched distros, but I really like KDE, so I want to troubleshoot this.

Has anybody seen this before? Does anybody have any ideas? Is there more information I can provide to troubleshoot this?

Thanks

Interesting... are you using any non-default applets in particular?
Does restarting KWin instead of Plasma Desktop have the same impact?

Code: Select all

kwin --replace

Thanks for the reply bcooksley...
I actually opened a bug in the KDE bug tracker after posting this (bug 301022), and the fine folks in the KDE community helped fix the problem:

It turned out to be a settings issue: my .kde/share/config/plasma-desktop-appletsrc config file got corrupted somehow, and the desktop's depth value got changed such that it was being displayed on top of everything else. Because of this, windows and panels were hidden behind my desktop. This also explains why the windows became visible when I killed the plasma-desktop process.
I replaced the above mentioned configuration file with that of a brand new user. This fixed the problem by reverting all of my settings.

I still don't know why my configuration file got corrupted, and why this seems to happen to me regularly with every KDE distro I try, but I'm really glad that I got my plasma desktop working again. The only downside, is that because I can't understand the contents of plasma-desktop-appletsrc, I couldn't selectively modify it to fix the problem, and in replacing it altogether, I lost all of the customizations I made to my desktop (to the panels and such).
Still, this is a tiny price to pay to have my KDE working and not having to switch back to gnome

You should probably run a diagnostic validation on your hard drive.
That's the worst-case scenario for files being corrupted, and also the one to address soonest.

In the meantime, a scheduled job via cron to copy the file with your customizations and name it with yyyy-mm-dd so you can track it would be a good idea.

Or, if you are more comfortable using a code repository such as cvs, svn, git, mercurial etc, you could set up a repo, checkout a working copy (WC), copy the file to the WC, add it and commit it.

Then set up a cron job to copy it and commit it every minute.

A commit with no changes will be ignored, and not clutter up your hard drive with endless yyyy-mm-dd files.

If it gets corrupted, you can merely play back the revisions until you find a good one.

Of course, the ideal would be to find the course of the corruption. But using either of these techniques may well turn up some facts that would help, such as a regular time that it happens (ever night at 12:01 am) or something that triggers your memory (every time you logout), etc.

But at least you'll have all your settings any time you want to restore them.

Thanks for the suggestions RichardLynch!

I'll definetly run a disk diagnostic asap...
and I really like your svn suggestion. I've already got a repo up for my source code so I'll add the cron job to back up my kde configuration too.

Due to the nature of Plasma, changes in the version which is in use (especially from newer to older, or between different distributions, which occasionally have patches) can cause unusual issues such as this.

Hello,
The problem is not coming from your disk: see my comment in your bug ticket...
Thanks for not letting me feel alone

Can you please post a link to that bug here so that people in the future who have this problem can check on the status of this issue?