Kmix wierdness

[nukedathlonman]

Okay, I've never had a sound system issue with Ubuntu at any point, but right now, I'm having a crap load of problems with kmix. I don't have a kmix system icon, which is semi annoying. The real problems begin if I load it manually - the task manager displays it bouncing up and downm and then it vanishes after about 30 seconds. Then after well over 20 minutes all of a sudden I get the mixer box appearing... Kmixer also does not respond to the volume up, down and mute inputs at all. Like opening Kmix, it takes 20 minutes before it shows the requested input on screen, and while the display box shows what i want, it doesn't actually change the volume levels. I've looked though all my logs, and nothing jumps out at me. The computer is an old Dell Vostro 1720, a WD 1tb black drive, 8 GB RAM, GeForce 9600M GS, and a 1920x1200 resolution screen (nope, not an HD "1080" screen). I've got no other issues post update so far, and generally happy with the look and feel. But I've never seen such an odd issue before.

[nukedathlonman]

Don't worry about it, I've had enough of Vivid (all the oddities, the stutters, and crashes - seems to me Vivid is still too unstable) - I've restored my system to pre-upgrade state.

[xennex81]

You know I'm really just thankful for a person who just expresses himself.

[nukedathlonman]

Sorry. It seemed good for the first few hours except for the Kmix issue, and I really like the look of Plasma 5. But by the next day, the longer it ran, the more I noticed apps were stuttering really badly (looked like what one would see if the CPU was being throttled, yet I know wasn't thermal throttling), system responsiveness was going down hill, and I started to see a huge amount of crashes... I just found myself overwhelmed at the growing list of problems. First time I've ever had an upgrade go down hill. I'm very surprised, the reason I run Kubuntu is that it has been solid all the way back to Drapper. I have a less critial system (my gaming desktop) - I'll copy the install to the spare HD and try the upgrade on that - see how things go.

[xennex81]

I've said before that I think it will take two years before there is a good release.

[nukedathlonman]

Okay, so I did the copy over and got my 14.10 install up and running on my desktop on an old 500gb HD. I performed the upgrade, and hit the same brick wall with oddities with KMix. I just concentrated all my efforts on trying to figure out what was going on with Kmix first. Nothing in any of the logs was indicating a problem, yet Kmix would take forever to show, and when it show, it was unresponsive, and wouldn't accept inputs, pegged a core to the max, etc. I installed the Pulse Audio tools and started looking at Pulse thinking that maybe it was a conflict. After 2 hours, I ended up starting to delete the configurations files for Kmix first (next I was going to hit pulse audio) - but thats when all of a sudden Kmix started working perfectly (and still working perfectly an hour in). So for those doing system upgrades (such as me, this install is quite old and started off as 6.06 Drapper back in 2006) as opposed to clean install, be prepared to delete kmixctrlrc and kmixrc in `/.kde/share/config, and the files/directories (folders) in ~/.kde/share/apps/kmix (I renamed them and then deleted them once I established that KMix was working), Next, I've got to look into the stability side of things...