KDE crashes after a few minutes of use

[tendays]

Hello, this is my first post here so forgive me if I break any rule I'm unaware of...

So I recently upgraded from kubuntu 8.04 to 8.10, and kde 4.1.4 (from the "about kde" menu entries) is extremely unstable to me. Basically after a few minutes it crashes and takes down the whole X session (and I'm back to the login screen). I am currently using kde applications (kontact, kopete, klipper, konqueror, etc) in the "ion3" window manager, where I do not experience any crash.

I have an Nvidia GeForce GO 7300, and am running the proprietary driver version 177.82 (which I installed using the "kde-jockey" tool). I tried the "nv" driver but it would crash before the login is completed.

Some threads talk about the disk being full (mine is not) or $HOME having permission problems (my user owns all files in it).

I deactivated "desktop effects" but the crashes remain. Although the crashes are mostly random, one repeatable way is to click on the taskbar "cashew" then hover the mouse in the green taskbar resizing triangle. As soon as the cursor touches that triangle, the screen goes black and I'm back to the login screen.

Any idea? What more information could I provide?

(In a short while I will try running kdestart from the terminal and paste the output in here)

Many thanks

Edit: removed the "solved" tag

[musta ruhtinas]

Re: KDE crashes after a few minutes of use

I would first try a newer version of the nvidia drivers. May not solve your problem, but you will certainly notice the improvement.
I had plenty of issues with 177 on kde4. Right now they're at 180.27, with 180.22 being the stable version, and work much better.

I have used this ppa before and had no troubles with the nvidia packages.

[sithlord48]

Re: KDE crashes after a few minutes of use

you might also want to try to upgrade to kde 4.2 you can find out how to do so here...
http://www.kubuntu.org/news/kde-4.2 since you seam to have problems with your GUI look below.

you can edit your sources.list via the CLI easillly first at your log in prompt press Ctrl+Alt+F1 this will bring up a CLI screen where you can log in (as normal)
next you want to add the repo to ur sources.list file you can do so by typing this

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

go down to the the bottom of the file and add this line

deb [url]http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-experimental/ubuntu[/url] intrepid main

then save and exit.
now type this command to get the gpg key added

gpg --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 493B3065 && gpg --export -a 493B3065 | sudo apt-key add -

after that you want to do an update /upgrade

 sudo apt-get update 
sudo apt-get upgrade

you should have quite a few packages to upgrade. when done reboot your machine

sudo reboot

hopefully now you can stay loged in to kde

[tendays]

Re: KDE crashes after a few minutes of use

Ok, good news! (EDIT: actually not - see the bottom of this post)

I updated the nvidia drivers to version 180.27, then kde to 4.2.0.

I should mention that upgrading kde was a bit messy:

The package kde-window-manager wouldn't upgrade because the file /usr/share/kde4/apps/kconf_update/plasma-add-shortcut-to-menu.upd, owned by kdebase-workspace-data, was in the way. Then systemsettings wouldn't upgrade because /usr/lib/kde4/kcm_colors.so owned by kdebase-workspace-bin was in the way.

So what I did is, I removed kdebase-workspace-bin (kscreensaver and kubuntu-desktop depended on it so they had to be removed as well) as well as kdebase-workspace-data. That caused

the installation of:
kdebase-plasma kdebase-workspace-libs4+5 kdepimlibs5 kdeplasma-addons-data ksysguard libical0 libplasma3 plasmoid-quickaccess ; libical0 libplasma3

the uninstallation of compiz-kde kate-kde4 kdebase-workspace-data kdeplasma-addons kdeplasma-addons-libs4 libplasma2

and the upgrade of
kdebase-plasma kdebase-workspace-libs4+5 kdepimlibs5 kdeplasma-addons-data ksysguard plasmoid-quickaccess

Then running again apt-get upgrade was successful and it upgraded
akregator kaddressbook kate kde-window-manager kdepim-kresources kdepim-strigi-plugins kdepim-wizards knotes kontact korganizer ktimetracker kuser libkdepim4 libkleo4
python-kde4.
Then I reinstalled kde-workspace-data and -bin.

At this point I tried logging in and it crashed again. I renamed my .kde folder and now it seems to work (apart from a few bugs I can live with). I should mention that I had already tried removing my .kde folder before and it hadn't helped at all.

I've been using kde for about one hour now, trying the effects and all. I'm not sure what was causing the crash, I guess I could try to move one by one the data from the old .kde to the new one and see when it starts crashing again but I may be a bit lazy.

Thanks a lot.

EDIT: It was apparently just a weird coincidence that it lasted a bit over an hour now, and I have a reproducible way to trigger the bug:

1) Move the .kde directory out of the way
2) start a kde session
3) click on the taskbar "cashew"
4) use the slider to reduce the width
5) hover on the sliders.

Then the X session goes down with a signal 11.

I am attaching the output of startkde, as well as the X.org log file (which contains a backtrace)

EDIT2: Okay sorry but I'm giving up. I need this computer for my work and there are too many things that don't work. So I'm reinstalling kubuntu 8.04 and won't be able to further troubleshoot this problem.

[sithlord48]

Re: KDE crashes after a few minutes of use

have you checked to see if this is a known kde bug?
and if not i would make a report of it..
https://bugs.kde.org/

[tendays]

Re: KDE crashes after a few minutes of use

I was offline for about a month but wanted to respond to this:

have you checked to see if this is a known kde bug?
and if not i would make a report of it..
https://bugs.kde.org/

I thought of it but as I said I came back to kde 3 and have no easy way to keep both versions in parallel. So I doubt a report could be useful as I would be unable to provide more information, to test patches or do experiments...
Thanks for the help though.