[Solved] Weird Plasma desktop crashes

[Chopstick]

Hi, I've recently updated to Natty (64bit, clean install).

I'm experiencing strange behavior in plasma; the symptoms are as follows:
First I get plasma notifications (the usual notifier pop-up) telling me about some file transfers (which I never initiated) and sometimes I see a progress bar (the one you get when you do larger file transfers). This pops up every half a minute of so, until after about 15 minutes (and ~30 pop-ups clogging up my notifications!) the plasma desktop crashes and restarts. After the restart the behavior is normal (no weird pop-ups).

I've already experienced this problem in KDE 4.5 (Maverick); I was hoping a clean install would fix it. Unfortunately not so: the same problem is also occurring with my new, clean install in KDE 4.6!
The problem is annoying because the pop-ups grab the focus from other plasma windows, the system lags, and they clog up the notifications. It usually results in a crash and restart of plasma and then is gone for a while. It happens approximately once per day on my laptop (T60p, ATI card, open source driver) but never happened on my desktop.

Any ideas what this might be?

Chopstick

[GreyGeek]

Re: Weird Plasma desktop crashes

Have you tried disabling Desktop Effects? (Kgear-->settings-->system settings-->Desktop)

[Chopstick]

Re: Weird Plasma desktop crashes

I haven't, at least not explicitly; but I have never noticed this behavior when desktop effects were off for some other reason. I will try to switch them off next time it happens, and see if it stops.
Of course I don't want to live without desktop effects, but it will be a good diagnostic.

[Chopstick]

Re: Weird Plasma desktop crashes

Switching off desktop effects has no effect on this behavior.

[sithlord48]

Re: Weird Plasma desktop crashes

if you have not done so i would back up your ~/.kde folder and then remove it most all your settings are saved there, just incase its something you did on accident.

[Chopstick]

Re: Weird Plasma desktop crashes

Actually I highly suspect that it is something in my settings. After the clean install and before I started customizing stuff, I didn't encounter this problem.
Of course it is possible that this was just a coincidence.

I'm somewhat reluctant to test that again, because I would have to work on a standard desktop for a while until it happens again... but if no one else has a better idea, I may have to do that.

Did anyone else ever encounter this problem? I googled but didn't find anything, but maybe I'm just not searching for the right thing... ?

[dibl]

Re: Weird Plasma desktop crashes

I get plasma notifications (the usual notifier pop-up) telling me about some file transfers (which I never initiated)

That seems odd -- I've never seen it and I haven't seen any other reports of such a phenomenon.

Can you capture the exact notification message? It might be worth a google to see if it is a known bug of some sort.

[Teunis]

Re: Weird Plasma desktop crashes

Ah, when I started reading your message my first thought was 'this must be due to some non-default program/ setting'.
I must have installed various Kubuntu's for over a hundred times and never experienced such behaviour.

[Chopstick]

Re: Weird Plasma desktop crashes

The weird thing is, the configuration on my laptop and my desktop is almost identical, and it never happened on my desktop.
And I don't think I have anything weird or extremely unusual in my configuration. I installed custom fonts, but, again, identical on both systems.
Is it possible that it is related to the video driver? My laptop has an older ATI card (running on open-source driver) and the desktop has a more recent (but cheap) NVIDIA card (with proprietary driver).

[Chopstick]

Re: Weird Plasma desktop crashes

I've done some more searching: maybe I was looking in the wrong direction. I found this bug report: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=209004
Comment #18 sounds similar to what I experience (although I never saw any connection to amarok) and comment #22 claims it is because of the nowplaying-widget (which I have).

I removed the nowplaying applet to see, if it happens again; I'll post results. (In contrast to other posters in the said bug report, I had no difficulty removing it...)