Plasma covers everything

dext · 2010-10-20 06:58:01

I have made full upgrade today (I'm using open source ATI driver). After restarting X, I can see only wallpaper.

I have killed plasma and the daemon which auto restarts it, so now I can work, but I like plasma I have no clue what is going on, so I don't know what else I should tell you.

Last edited by dext (2010-10-20 06:58:19)

alennon · 2010-10-27 12:11:24

I've got a similar problem.

I temporarily fixed it by backing up my .kde4/ directory and logging back into allow KDE to create a fresh .kde4 directory. However it reoccurred on the next login this morning.

A workaround for now on my system is to try to get plasma-workspace to crash and restart itself, after which things return to normal (in my case plasma crashes if I try to add a widget to the desktop when it is not behaving correctly).

I've been getting strange behaviour with plasma for a couple of weeks now but it got particularly bad when I upgraded the system on Tuesday (I noticed several xorg related packages were upgraded---perhaps this may be relevant?).

I hope this can help you for now until a fix appears.

Note: I'm using a dual head set-up with the open source ati radeon drivers.

dext · 2010-10-27 12:27:29

I have got this on 3 different computers. Laptop and 2 times dualhead PC. Every computer use Free driver for ati. GPUs are: 7500, x550 and 5750.

alennon · 2010-10-28 13:57:04

If any of those cards are compatible with the Catalyst drivers it might be worth checking if the problem remains after switching to catalyst---at least that would confirm whether or not the problem lies with the radeon driver. Unfortunately my own card is too old (Radeon X300 (RV370)) and has been dropped by AMD for the catalyst drivers.

If this wasn't a work PC I'd have swapped the card for an Nvidia long ago---the OpenGL performance of the open source radeon drivers is really sucky for some CAD applications that I need to use.

ssri · 2010-10-29 07:39:37

In my case, I found out that kwin in kde 4.5.2 does not seem to play well with opengl 1.5 (mesa [extra]): constant plasma crashing. Installing mesa, ati-dri, xf86-video-ati and any of their dependencies from [testing] fixed my problem. I recall that both KDE 4.5.0 and KDE 4.5.1 worked fine with opengl 1.5. Also, be sure to install mesa-demos since it provides glxgears, glxinfo, etc. Some programs like xbmc won't run without glxinfo. BTW, my laptop display uses an ATi Mobility Radeon x2300 chip (legacy card).

OpenGL vendor string: X.Org R300 Project
OpenGL renderer string: Gallium 0.4 on RV515
OpenGL version string: 2.1 Mesa 7.9

Last edited by ssri (2010-10-29 07:42:08)

alennon · 2010-11-16 11:32:34

Thanks for the hint on the gallium drivers for radeon---it's revolutionised my OpenGL experience.

However, returning to the thread topic it unfortunately does not solve the plasma problem. My previous workaround still does the trick though so I'm happy enough to truck along for now with KDE.

[Edit 12th Dec 2010]
The previous workaround stopped working on my latest system update so I just wrote a quick bash script to kill and restart plasma-desktop:

#! /bin/sh
killall plasma desktop
kdeinit plasma-desktop

Last edited by alennon (2010-12-06 11:58:55)

Arch Linux

#1 2010-10-20 06:58:01

Plasma covers everything

#2 2010-10-27 12:11:24

Re: Plasma covers everything

#3 2010-10-27 12:27:29

Re: Plasma covers everything

#4 2010-10-28 13:57:04

Re: Plasma covers everything

#5 2010-10-29 07:39:37

Re: Plasma covers everything

#6 2010-11-16 11:32:34

Re: Plasma covers everything

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