No doubt it's something wrong with my setup, but the KDE Plasma desktop is working so badly here I have to resort to Gnome3, which I don't really like at all.

What happens?
When starting up, if I can get a menu bar at all, it takes ages (somewhere between 5 and 15 minutes) to become available.
At the moment I can't get a menu bar at all, but (most of the time) if I put the cursor in the top left corner it will give me a display of all the applications open and, fortunately, Konsole is one of them so I can start most of what I want.

I'm running Fedora 15, x86_64, dual core AMD Athlon, KDE 4.6.5, 6Gb of RAM, a few hundred gig of disk available. It's a fairly plain setup, because I'm not very familiar with Linux (oooh, the menu bar has just become available, that's over five minutes since it last appeared, although I hadn't either rebooted or re-logged in since it was working before that).

As I said, I'm sure it's something I've done, but where do I start looking? And what for? I really don't like Gnome3 but KDE is all but unusable on this machine.

If it is the same as the last time I ran it, it'll lock up fairly frequently. That's KDE locking up, not the machine, usually. That (usually) means that the application I'm working in keeps working just fine, but I can't use any of the desktop features, minor things like changing workspace ('cos I can't get a menu), even changing window sometimes

I am technical (I've been a software developer for a [very] long time), but not used to Linux.

since "it was working before that" I'm guessing that there's a rogue process eating up your cpu, ram and/or disk io

run ksysguard, the KDE system monitor (make sure it's set for "all processes", top right of window) and sort on cpu descending is anything using all the cpu? do the same for memory and io write and io read. Note for the io's you'll need to add their column - just right click on any column header and click "show io ..."

you can do this in konsole running:
top - for cpu
free - for ram and swap total usage (post results)
iotop - for disk io (ctrl+c to quit)

Thanks for that.

The CPU consumption doesn't show up anything I wouldn't expect, except perhaps knotify4, but that seems reasonable.

Free shows

Code: Select all

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       5996708    4098060    1898648          0     463288    2132892
-/+ buffers/cache:    1501880    4494828
Swap:      3866620          0    3866620


which seems a bit excessive, but I can't see anything particularly that's taking a lot, except Firefox, but that seems to be a problem generally at the moment.

iotop doesn't work (command not found), but adding the columns in the system monitor window doesn't show up anything working hard.

I've just logged out and in (due to package update) and it was usable immediately I re-logged in... hmmm, something fixed by recent upgrades p'raps? Dunno.

Thanks for your help. I'll come back if the problem comes back.

if resolved please mark thread as such