KDE & kernel26 2.6.19

djclue917 · 2006-12-12 16:34:23

I had noticed a lot of changes with regards to KDE after I upgraded to 2.6.19. After the upgrade, I am experiencing these problems:

1. Display goes blank after switching from one KDE session to another by using the key combinations Ctrl+Alt+F7, Ctrl+Alt+F8, etc.

To reproduce, login to KDE, start a new KDE session. Try switching to one KDE session to the other and to the other ttys as well by using the hot keys.

2. When starting a new KDE session, aRts would complain that it cannot use the current device. I'm guessing that this is a "device in use/locked" issue. However, this is not true in 2.6.18. I've already tried opening a new KDE session and aRts goes on just fine. aRts can play system notifications in one session as well as from the other session.

So I guess these are kernel-related problems.

Bralkein · 2006-12-12 21:24:41

I don't get the first problem you described, but it sounds like something to do with your graphics drivers. What kind of graphics card do you use? As for the second problem, I don't use aRts, so I don't know anything about that.

djclue917 · 2006-12-13 04:49:42

Bralkein wrote:

I don't get the first problem you described, but it sounds like something to do with your graphics drivers. What kind of graphics card do you use? As for the second problem, I don't use aRts, so I don't know anything about that.

Ok. Let me clarify that... If I log into KDE and then start a new session as another user (or maybe even as the same user), switch to a virtual terminal, say tty1, then try to switch back to any of the two KDE sessions by using the shortcut Ctrl+Alt+F7 or +F8, I sometimes get a blank screen. Now, when that blank (black, as if no output is displayed) screen appears, I won't see a thing of course. I know that not the whole system froze since I was still hearing Amarok playing. The only problem is that my system neither responds to my keyboard nor to my mouse. Which means that this problem maybe related to X...

However, this problem doesn't happen when I switch sessions via K Menu -> Switch User.

However (again), this only happened when I upgraded to 2.6.19

Bralkein · 2006-12-14 11:42:10

Buh, sorry, when I said I don't get it, I meant that I use KDE and kernel 2.6.19 and I tried creating two KDE sessions, then switching around between all the vc channels, but it doesn't freeze or anything like that. I probably should have been clearer! I mentioned graphics drivers because I remember when I used to have an ATI card, it would never play well with newer kernels, and things like you described would happen.

I briefly tried starting artsd as well, but it seems to work ok for me :S
If you start artsd in a command window, does it give you any helpful error messages?

Oh, also, are you using the vanilla kernel, or do you use the MM kernel or something like that?

djclue917 · 2006-12-14 13:52:10

Bralkein wrote:

Buh, sorry, when I said I don't get it, I meant that I use KDE and kernel 2.6.19 and I tried creating two KDE sessions, then switching around between all the vc channels, but it doesn't freeze or anything like that. I probably should have been clearer! I mentioned graphics drivers because I remember when I used to have an ATI card, it would never play well with newer kernels, and things like you described would happen.
I briefly tried starting artsd as well, but it seems to work ok for me :S
If you start artsd in a command window, does it give you any helpful error messages?
Oh, also, are you using the vanilla kernel, or do you use the MM kernel or something like that?

Hmmm.. Come to think about it, maybe it really has something to do with the ATI proprietary driver.

When you started two KDE sessions, does the second KDE session's instance of artsd use the null output because of some weird error?

By the way, I'm using the vanilla kernel.

Bralkein · 2006-12-16 03:06:20

Yes, ATI drivers are pretty bad right now, and always have been. However, it looks like a new version has just hit the repository, and the changelog indicates that it fixes this problem of yours.

To avoid future problems, you can hope that the driver gets better now that AMD is in charge, or you could try the R300 open-source driver if you haven't already. It might work better for you, so it's worth a try if you haven't already done so.

I have tried to mimic your setup, but I am unable to duplicate the sound problem you're having. I think the problem you have is to do with software mixing. Now, for multiple programs to play sound at the same time, the sound streams must be mixed together, otherwise only one program will be allowed to use the sound device at any one time. Some sound cards can do the mixing in hardware, but most devices need it to be done in software. Most of the time, software mixing is automatically set up for you by ALSA, but it seems possible that a kernel update could have changed your sound drivers and broken this system for you.

A simple way to check would be to try and play audio using two programs simutaneously, for example xine and mplayer. It is important that they don't try and use arts, since this only counts as playing from one program (i.e. artsd), so don't use JuK and Kaboodle, or something like that. If software mixing is not enabled, a problem will be reported and only one program will be able to play sound. If this happens, try and set up /etc/asound.conf as explained in this HOWTO.

If this doesn't fix it, then I don't know what's wrong. You could try playing around with the sound system setting in KDE Control Panel, but I'm not sure.

I think you've basically had some bad luck here. I hope things work out for you soon!

mrvw0169 · 2006-12-16 03:56:41

I think I also have a KDE + 2.6.19 problem appear recently... Everytime I try to open Konqueror for file management (clicking on the Home icon), it takes 5-10 minutes before it starts up. This doesn't happen for Konqueror for web browsing though.

Also, KPDF is even worse. 20-30 minutes before it shows up and if I click something like Save PDF, it will hang (necessitating xkill).

For Konqueror or Firefox for web browsing it is just ridiculous too, 30 secs - 1 minute to establish a connection with any webserver, everytime, but once connected, that page downloads fast... I've tried "alias net-pf-10 off" in modprobe.conf and export KDE_NO_IPV6=TRUE and took out IP6 support in the kernel completely using both beyond and vanilla sources and no help. It's definitely not the network because I'm on my uni's super fast connection and my server running W2K is not affected...

Anyone know what's up? I also tried reinstalling kdebase, kdegraphics, kdelibs and that helped for about 30 minutes where everything was back to normal, but then afterwards, I got the huge delays again... Not my processor: 2.0 GHz P-M, memory: 512 MB (still have 100MB free when this happens, swap use = 0), not some stupid CFLAGS (I always use binaries)...

It was working fine before 2.6.19 upgrade... I had reinstalled originally from tpowa's newisos with 2.6.19rc2 last month and that was running fine until a week ago... And I didn't even install any software since... Any help please?

Bralkein · 2006-12-16 05:44:03

20-30 minutes? Yikes! I have seen various threads around with problems similar to these. Have you tried searching the forums?

Sometimes if I have a problem with a GUI app, I find it can be helpful to run the app in a command window, to see if there are any helpful error messages that are not normally visible.

Sometimes apps can have mysterious problems due to bad config files. It might be useful to create a new user with a new home directory so you can see if the problems go away with a "clean" setup. If the problems don't happen for the new user, then unfortunately you might have to delete your ~/.kde folder, or maybe just the specific configuration files for the affected programs, if you can track them down.

For the internet problems, you say that you have no problems with Windows 2000, but it's worth double-checking. When I used university internet, the bandwith was always very high, but depending on the time of day, the connection could become very busy. When this happened, the latency increased dramatically, giving the kind of symptoms you experience. If you're sure that Linux is to blame, then I don't know how to help you, but you might try downloading files with the wget command to see what the response time is like with that. It should give you an idea of how deep the problem lies - but if the behaviour is the same with Firefox and Konqueror, then it's probably fairly fundamental.

Oh, here's a thought - are you on a proxy? I know Konqueror and Firefox have the ability to automatically detect proxy settings, and maybe this is what you're using. If the methods used by both browsers were slow, then this could cause the symptoms you experience. Maybe it would improve matters if you could manually specify the proxy settings. If you don't connect through a proxy, then obviously that won't be the problem!

Hope this helps.

mrvw0169 · 2006-12-16 06:10:11

Thanks for your suggestions and it did help lead me to the solution!

I was running my applications from the terminal but it didn't have anything that helped my problem... I also tried with a different user but same problems... so it probably was a config problem like you said... then I remembered about strace and that helped me fix my problem...

>$ strace krusader 
...
socket(PF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, IPPROTO_TCP) = 11
bind(11, {sa_family=AF_INET, sin_port=htons(0), sin_addr=inet_addr("0.0.0.0")}, 16) = 0
connect(11, {sa_family=AF_INET, sin_port=htons(111), sin_addr=inet_addr("127.0.0.1")}, 16 <unfinished>

which showed it never being able to find localhost - weird - and upon further inspection, my /etc/hosts got seriously messed up! So I recreated this and all is well. Network speed is back and all apps are fine... I've added etc/hosts to NoUpgrade in rc.conf just in case (don't know what would be trying to upgrade that though...)

mcrae · 2006-12-22 03:07:36

[Edited for clarity]
I experience this on a clean install today and have experienced it for a month at least. I keep everything current.
In kde if I switch users (we have 3 users) it will go black and not log off for a long time. If I log the user out through the k-menu and then switch to another session using hot keys I can still see the other users running for quite a while

So, 3 users logged in with no apps running. If you try to switch to different users through k-menu or hot keys it will go black. If you try to go into the other 2 users and log them out through k-menu you will have to use hot keys ctl-f7 to get back and even then you can look at gkrellm or top and see the other 2 still running for quite some time.
I have a nvidia 6200tc using the current nvidia driver.

This has led my wife and daughter to moan and complain about wanting to use the suse 10.2 install I installed to test (just to play with) instead of my beloved Arch! It's hard to explain why I like arch better when this is happeing. And there iPods just work, my casio camera is detected. They don't see that this is just dads incompetance.........oh, and I don't tell them LOL.

mcrae · 2006-12-22 13:34:09

this also happened using kernel26ck.....current.

Bralkein · 2006-12-22 22:05:34

I have tried to replicate your problem, but I did not succeed. If you don't have this problem on Suse, it does seem unlikely that it would be a graphics driver problem, but it might be worth checking what kernel/X.org/driver versions Suse uses just so you can rule it out.

I have absolutely no idea how the KDE user-switching mechanism works, and I can't find any information right now, but if you could do so then it might shed some light on the nature of the problem.

How do you start KDE? I don't know if this has really has any bearing on things, but it might somehow be a factor. If you start it via an entry in inittab, maybe you could try starting it by appending "kdm" to the end of the list of startup daemons in /etc/rc.conf.

Also, you might have some kind of problem in your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. It might be worth looking through, just to see if you can see anything wrong.

Finally, you might want to consider switching to Suse. I love Arch Linux; I never use anything else and I want to see its community grow. However, if Suse seems to better fulfil the needs of you and and your family, then that seems like a reasonable way to go. Suse is, IMHO, a pretty fine distribution. For what it's worth, it's the distribution that got me into Linux in the first place.

Good Luck!
P.S. I don't know anything about cameras, but for your ipod needs, have you tried Amarok? My friend uses with his ipod and seems happy with it.

mcrae · 2006-12-23 06:17:34

[I feel like i've hijacked this thread - as my experience was a little different from djclue917's. I'm sorry if that's the case. But the problem was so similar I didn't want to start a new thread. djclue917 have you resolved this problem?]

Bralkein,
Thanks for your reply. Suse has a lot going on in it and it makes me nervous. Plus, I want to stick it out and learn something.
I reinstalled my arch system with the new install CD for the hell of it. I use kde by putting
kdm in my daemon rc.conf.
I'm using nvidia-ck 9631-3, along with kernel 2.6.19.ck2-3. So far so good. I'm switching between users with very little delay using the k-menu swith user and/or hot keys.
So, who knows maybe I just had something I was configuring wrong on my other installs......
Getting the casio camera to work is a damn mystery to me........but by god I'm going to get the ipod to work right.
I'm always tickled when I install Arch. When I used gentoo it took quite a bit of time compared to Arch....so simple.
Thanks again,
McRae

Bralkein · 2006-12-23 15:09:58

Yeah, I understand what you mean about Suse. By trying to make it user-friendly, they end up putting all kinds of weird crap under the hood, and if you ever need (or just want) to go down there, you're in for a gigantic headache!

I wouldn't worry about hijacking the thread - better idea than starting a new one, and djclue917's last reply was 9 days ago, so he probably fixed his problems

Good luck with your other problems - they're probably just a case of installing the right software. I'd try libgpod + amarok to manage the ipod, and gphoto2 for the camera.

djclue917 · 2006-12-26 15:54:15

mcrae wrote:

[I feel like i've hijacked this thread - as my experience was a little different from djclue917's. I'm sorry if that's the case. But the problem was so similar I didn't want to start a new thread. djclue917 have you resolved this problem?]

Hi. I think the problem is the proprietary driver itself. I only experience that problem when I use the latest fglrx drivers + linux 2.6.19. I think it's a compatibility issue with the latest kernel release. However, I'm not sure if this is indeed an upstream or a packaging bug. Using the open source drivers did it for me that's why I'm sticking with the open source drivers for a while.

At least I'm at peace to know that the open source drivers are most probably less buggy than the proprietary ones...

With that said, I advice you to try the open source NVIDIA drivers. (Although I don't know how much they lag behind the proprietary ones... BTW, the open source ATI drivers are doing fine for me. )

Bralkein · 2006-12-29 02:23:47

In fact, the story with open-source drivers for nvidia and ATI cards is an interesting one. Because the ATI proprietary drivers are so flaky, open-source drivers were in great demand and have therefore been developed to a fairly high level of completion. While the nvidia proprietary drivers have their problems, they are generally satisfactory for most people, so the nvidia open-source drivers are not nearly as complete as the ATI ones!

If you have an nvidia card, the closed drivers are really your best bet, but the answer is not so clear when you have an ATI device.

djclue917 · 2006-12-31 14:29:47

Bralkein wrote:

If you have an nvidia card, the closed drivers are really your best bet, but the answer is not so clear when you have an ATI device.

I agree. However, there are some "ironic" (or weird even) things that I encounter on my system. The difference in the performance of the two drivers, radeon and fglrx, when running Warcraft III via Wine isn't really that noticeable. Actually, I'm quite surprised that the radeon drivers could really deliver that kind of performance. When I run native Linux games like Tremulous and Maniadrive, however, the radeon (open source) driver performs very poorly compared to the proprietary one.

Kenetixx · 2007-01-03 03:42:46

I had all sorts of trouble with kernel 2.6.19 and kde but now i have gone back to gnome all problems have stopped. the biggest problem i had was with random freezes for no apparent reason, the only way out was to hard reset the pc, now back on gnome for the last 3 days i have had not one issue that i had on kde, seems weird to me.

Arch Linux

#1 2006-12-12 16:34:23

KDE & kernel26 2.6.19

#2 2006-12-12 21:24:41

Re: KDE & kernel26 2.6.19

#3 2006-12-13 04:49:42

Re: KDE & kernel26 2.6.19

#4 2006-12-14 11:42:10

Re: KDE & kernel26 2.6.19

#5 2006-12-14 13:52:10

Re: KDE & kernel26 2.6.19

#6 2006-12-16 03:06:20

Re: KDE & kernel26 2.6.19

#7 2006-12-16 03:56:41

Re: KDE & kernel26 2.6.19

#8 2006-12-16 05:44:03

Re: KDE & kernel26 2.6.19

#9 2006-12-16 06:10:11

Re: KDE & kernel26 2.6.19

#10 2006-12-22 03:07:36

Re: KDE & kernel26 2.6.19

#11 2006-12-22 13:34:09

Re: KDE & kernel26 2.6.19

#12 2006-12-22 22:05:34

Re: KDE & kernel26 2.6.19

#13 2006-12-23 06:17:34

Re: KDE & kernel26 2.6.19

#14 2006-12-23 15:09:58

Re: KDE & kernel26 2.6.19

#15 2006-12-26 15:54:15

Re: KDE & kernel26 2.6.19

#16 2006-12-29 02:23:47

Re: KDE & kernel26 2.6.19

#17 2006-12-31 14:29:47

Re: KDE & kernel26 2.6.19

#18 2007-01-03 03:42:46

Re: KDE & kernel26 2.6.19

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