Hello everyone.
Well the title only states half the problem. and the truth is I am not even sure how to phrase this problem as a google search in order to get some search-hits... so here it goes:
I am running slackware-current on a laptop, the gpu is ATI radeon X300 and the gpu driver is 'radeon'.

now, the problem seems to be with plasma-desktop application of kde4. when I log on to an X session (i'm usually booting in runlevel3 and if I want gui i do 'startx') things seem to load up fine until the point that the task-bar appears. Then, NO mouse action ((double)-click, right-click) is interpreted, meaning that the K-menu doesn't pop up, nor i can open up any menus (on the desktop or the task-bar).

what i can do:
-I can still move the mouse.
-I can press Alt+F2 to get a run prompt
-A konsole window I had left open from a previous session is still gonna start up and I can type in it.
-I can even click and drag the window around!

'top' doesn't show anything wrong (X and plasma-desktop seem to chew on resources sensibly) and plasma-desktop hasn't crashed.

Things didn't always used to be like that. kde4 worked fine up to the point I decided to start a session once from a windows machine (that is to say a remote X session).
To do that I used 'X-win32' and 'Putty' to ssh -X (well the windows equivalent of that) to my laptop and then do 'startkde'. The remote X session worked fine. and I can log on again and again from remotely and the X session will continue working fine.
But trying to startx (or startkde) locally on the laptop will leave me with a non responsive desktop...

Could it have something to do with 3d acceleration? - when i log in remotely, all the 'sweet' effects of kde4 (like fade in, or moving in of windows and menus is disabled).

But listen to this:
I did a bold move and deleted my account (its ok i only recently installed slackware in this laptop- so i don't have much stuff in it yet). then added a new user again and voila. logging in X locally is possible again.
so i wonder if something is 'released' properly after the remote X kde session. something like a pid file, or some script. There must be something I can delete (instead of the whole account, or the .kde folder) in order to 'reset' the session.

Final note: using xfce as gui, works equally well from local and remote log ons to X.

Any help or guidance as to what to do with this will be appreciated.
Thank you

First, try disabling desktop effects (use alt+shift+F12). If that doesn't work, try running from the commandline

kquitapp plasma-desktop

Then either rename or delete any file with "plasma" in the filename in .kde4/share/config or, if you don't have that, .kde/share/config. This will erase your desktop and panel layouts, so it might be better to rename them if you spent a lot of time setting them up.

ok well here are my findings:

I entered in the 'sick' state again.. desktop not responding.

I opened a konsole window (just to have it handy for doing the kquitapp later on) and I first pressed the combination alt+shift+F12.
The result was that the desktop background disappeared, and so did the task-bar.
I figured that plasma-desktop has crashed so from the konsole window I restarted it. now it started up fine though... properly loaded the desktop components.

Then I did a kquitapp to find myself in the same situation I was after the key combination. but this time it was controlled so I restarted it.
I'm not sure If there is any point in renaming the ~/.kde/share/config folder 'plasma' contents any more...

restarting X DID NOT load the desktop fine..

then i tried renaming the plasma-desktoprc and plasma-desktop-appletsrc files and voila it restarted properly.

One thing that just strike me is that the X win 32 has a different resolution in its window, compared to the resolution of the laptops monitor.. so it's possible some restrictions (for example in the geometry) are relaxed and that might be causing the problem... just a thought

Is there something next I could do?

Next I would try doing whatever it is you think caused the problem in the first place and see if you can reproduce it. If you can I would submit a bug report to bugs.kde.org.

hmmm so you think its a bug...?
for the record, yes it's easily reproducible..

ok then! thank you for your help!

hmm I just checked a desktop pc i have running slackware 13.0 64bits (with a 'huge' kernel and no other updates ie with kde v4.2.4) and it works like a charm.

yup. it looks like a bug.
I was using kde 4.5.1 with slackware current.
i removed it completely and reinstalled kde 4.4.3 - the one that came with slackware 13.1.
and it didn't do the problem again...

so i'm reporting it!:)

Met similar case after an incident with no space on device. Deleting the cache files instantly solved the issue.

Code: Select all

rm -rf .cache/plasma*

I had the same problem and solved it by removing the file `~/.config/plasmashellrc`. It removed whatever configuration there was so I had the chance to restart. I will now investigate the old file for what more I can do with it. Cheers