I'm running KDE4.1 on OpenSUSE10.3 on a Samsung Q45.

This morning I had a sound issue (ALSA cmd time out) which led me to do a major system update; over 100 packages and most of the day, upgrading the whole ship to the latest STABLE KDE4, updating mozilla, openoffice, and a lot of applications as well.

Unfortunately, during the afternoon tragedy struck...as they say in the tabloids...the battery was not secure and therefore the lappy somehow wasn't charging it despite being plugged in, and the thing ran out of juice with the update 71% complete. Rebooting, I found a broken KDE4 desktop - all the bits are there, except the system tray, and nothing was responsive. Dropping to a terminal showed all the usual processes; I killed plasma and attempted to run it from command line, returned "couldn't connect to X server".

So I rebooted and started KDE3.5.8; all the updated apps were present and correct, and the sound was back, and even the updated Amarok 2.0 runs without using the entire available RAM and half the swap. Great. I pushed on and completed updating, then shut down KDE and started a KDE4 session. The workspace appeared, the welcome tones were played (so the sound is back), the various start-up icons for tray apps were shown (so KWin is operational), but they didn't arrive in the system tray, and the screen is unresponsive. Plasma is clearly nonfunctional.

Dropping into a terminal and running top, I saw that it was consuming over 90% of CPU, occasionally dropping back to 30-40% and then chunking-out again. Going back into the X session, Plasma was now showing typical "plasma crash" symptoms - large chunks of white and black screen. However it didn't actually crash and restart.

There is nothing in /var/log/messages or really anywhere else that explains this.

Can you reproduce this with a new user?

Also please ensure that your system did fully update:

Code: Select all

sudo zypper refresh
sudo zypper dup

If a new user is not affected, try rebuilding the KDE 4 Information Cache:

Code: Select all

kbuildsycoca4 --noincremental

And removing Plasma's configuration

Code: Select all

rm -rf ~/.kde4/share/apps/plasma
rm -f ~/.kde4/share/config/plasm*

Zypper reports that all is up to date. I've just run kbuildsycoca4 - it hasn't returned anything.

Could it be something to do with the version of Qt and Qt-related libs in the KDE:Qt repo?

Checking, I've got:
libQtWebKit4 version 4.5.0-45.1 from KDE:Qt
(version 4.4.3-15.1 is in KDE:KDE4:STABLE)
libQt4 4.5.0-43.1 from KDE:Qt
(4.4.3-13.1 is in STABLE)
* -qt3-support 4.5.0-43.1 from KDE:Qt
(4.4.3-13.1 is in STABLE)
* -sql 4.5.0-43.1 from KDE:Qt
(4.4.3-13.1 is in STABLE)
* -mysql 4.5.0-45.1 from KDE:Qt
(4.4.3-15.1 is in STABLE)
* -sqlite 4.5.0-45.1 from KDE:Qt
(4.4.3-13.1 is in STABLE)
* -x11 4.5.0-43.1 from KDE:Qt
(4.4.3-13.1 is in STABLE)
and python-qt4 4.4.3-2.13 from STABLE
(4.4.4-5.1 is in KDE:Qt, but I couldn't install it due to dependency issues)

Remove the KDE:Qt repository since you are using KDE:KDE4:Stable, then forcibly update all Qt packages. ( libQt* )