Hmm... i'm out of ideas unfortunately at this stage.

Other than reinstalling the Plasma theme ( located at kdebase/workspace/plasma/netbook/desktoptheme in svn ), rebuilding any of the dependencies of Qt as well as Qt itself, I cannot think of anything else at this point in time. I would recommend filing a bug report at bugs.kde.org so the developers can try to track down the issue.

Sure, I understand.

Thanks for the help anyway. At least you had some original ideas to try.

A user wrote early on in the discussion on the Gentoo forums that he had to completely reinstall his system to get KDE working. I might have to face that dread prospect for my 1.6 GHz Atom now...

Given that only Plasma is crashing, removing $KDEDIR/share/apps/desktoptheme/ and re-emerging Plasma may fix the issue. Also try removing /var/tmp/kdecache-$USER/ outside of KDE.

I did not help to delete the requested folders and remerge, although it did create a slightly longer backtrace as I compiled all plasma-packages with debugging information.

The backtrace is here.

I am opening a new bug for this.

Please make sure that the file $KDEDIR/share/apps/desktoptheme/default/icons/battery.svgz and $KDEDIR/share/apps/desktoptheme/default/widgets/battery-oxygen.svgz exist.

If they do not, please file a bug with your distribution, as it is a packaging flaw.

You were right, battery.svgz was missing. I have filed a bug with my distribution. Thanks for finding this.

The bug is here.

PS. How can a missing icon cause a crash?

Because this is the *failsafe* final fallback SVG which Plasma expects to use. In addition, this file is part of a module "KDE Runtime" which all KDE applications do not expect to be missing under any circumstances.

Why it leads to the crash I do not know. You may wish to download a copy of this file from KDE SVN and place it in that location, to see if it rectifies this crash.

http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/KDE/kdebase ... ttery.svgz

I copied the file to the previously specified directory but it didn't help.

PS. Why does the backtrace not contain the strings that are used in the function parameters? Is it impossible to get the strings or is it just considered spam?

Interesting... according to the backtrace, the offending line is:

Code: Select all

    m_theme->setImagePath("widgets/battery-oxygen");

Can you please download a clean version of "battery-oxygen.svgz" from KDE SVN and copy it into /usr/share/apps/desktoptheme/default/widgets/

Finally, I got it to work again, and it wasn't even my intention.

To get better backtraces I recompiled qt-core, qt-gui and glib. When I then started KDE to get the new backtrace it suddenly just worked (well almost, some svg files seemed to be missing from the plasma-theme, but otherwise it worked).

I downloaded some new themes and everything is fine now.

I have also recompiled everything back to normal (without -ggdb option), and it still works.

Since I already upgraded Qt from 4.5 to 4.6 (and hence recompiled), my hypothesis is that glib was causing the problem, but how I'll never know.

Thank you for all your suggestions.