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#1 2010-03-21 18:02:44

zebulone
Member
Registered: 2009-09-19
Posts: 8

KDE unstable in fresh installation.

Hi everybody,

I've just given Arch a fresh try - in VMware this time. I've used the (very nice) "Official Install Guide" to set up a base system adding disk encryption with dm-crypt+lvm, then I added X and the VMware mouse and video drivers and everything seemed running fine so far.

Than I installed KDM, added it as a demon and installed the full KDE SC, again following the according wiki entries. It all seemed to go fine.

However KDE is running not very stable and performs very poorly.

1. All sorts of GUI-applications take very long to start or even crash with or without failure notice. E. g. the Run command interface (Strg+F2) crashes every second time with: "kdeinit4 [...] segmentation fault". After using KDE for a while the CPU-load tends to lock in at 100% but the process list does not show which processes consume all that cycles, I only spotted a few kwin zombies.

2. Also X does seem to take  a lot of resources. Moving a window around in (non-3D-mode) easily takes up to 80% CPU. Looking into Xorg.log the video driver seems to load but maybe I missed something.

3. I didn't install the VMware-extensions so far as I was unsure weather to use the install script provided by the application or the packet from the repositories.

I am aware this is not a very precise description but being new to Arch I'm quite unsure where to start troubleshooting so I'd be thankful for any sort of advice and will gladly provide missing information as soon as somebody points me to the right places to look at.

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#2 2010-03-21 18:18:01

schen
Member
Registered: 2009-06-06
Posts: 468

Re: KDE unstable in fresh installation.

First of all, it's "daemon", and not "demon".

Since you said that you were running KDE in VMware. Since it isn't your real computer, and takes resources from your normal operating system, that would explain the resources problem. The video problem, it could be with the video driver that you have. You might want to try installing Arch on a leftover computer you have. Also, you could use a lighter DE/WM to not up as much resources. You might want to try KDEmod. It's KDE optimized for Arch, and a lot faster.

Last edited by schen (2010-03-21 18:19:04)

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#3 2010-03-21 18:34:35

Pierre
Developer
From: Bonn
Registered: 2004-07-05
Posts: 1,964
Website

Re: KDE unstable in fresh installation.

schen wrote:

You might want to try KDEmod. It's KDE optimized for Arch, and a lot faster.

Sorry to tell you, but this is just wrong. It's not faster and "optimized for Arch" does not make any sense. Especially for new users I wouldn't recommend the usage of any third party repo at all.

On-Topic: If you get random segfaults and crashes a hardware or driver failure might be the cause. Maybe your VM cannot handle the new kernel or the drivers are just bad. You could try another VM like virtualbox or even better install on a real system/partition.

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#4 2010-03-21 18:51:47

schen
Member
Registered: 2009-06-06
Posts: 468

Re: KDE unstable in fresh installation.

KDEmod isn't Arch optimized? I was under the impression that it was, as it says on the homepage. Then again, who am I to argue with a KDE Developer?

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#5 2010-03-21 19:04:18

Pierre
Developer
From: Bonn
Registered: 2004-07-05
Posts: 1,964
Website

Re: KDE unstable in fresh installation.

"Arch optimized" has no real meaning. KDEmod is used in Chakra which is a Distribution based on Arch. There is no optimization. But this is a little picky anyway and depends on how you define "optimized". However: my point was just that there shouldn't be any difference in performance.

Anyway: let's stay on topic and not hijack this thread.

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#6 2010-03-21 19:29:01

zebulone
Member
Registered: 2009-09-19
Posts: 8

Re: KDE unstable in fresh installation.

Thanks for the answers!

@schen: I doubt it's a general resource problem. The VM has 1,5GB RAM and a 2GHz Intel "core" core assigned to it all of it's own in a configuration that runs other distros with KDE smoothly. I could try running it with the vesa driver, you think that might help?
[off-topic]
Thanks for maintaining the 100% quota in first answer=troll this forum has had for me so far. Already mad enough with typos you might want to look into syntax and punctuation next. Post #2 would be a good start wink
[/off-topic]

@Pierre: Thanks! Did I get you right that this might be a bug and not a misconfiguration on my side?

Aren't chances higher I screwed up somewhere? From my point of view the setting up seemed to go totally flawless however, up to the point of logging into KDE. I would have thought that running Arch inside a VM was quite common and well tested, isn't it? Is there maybe another way of ruling this out than installing another virtualisation combo?

[edit]Sorry, I just remembered to have VirtualBox on another system, I could try to import this VM there - or would a ground-up reinstallation be necessary?[/edit]

Last edited by zebulone (2010-03-21 19:39:43)

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#7 2010-03-21 19:42:11

Pierre
Developer
From: Bonn
Registered: 2004-07-05
Posts: 1,964
Website

Re: KDE unstable in fresh installation.

You didn't mention a lot of details. But among those you mentioned: You shouldn't use the kdm daemon script (afaik there are some race conditions) but use the inittab method instead. Also make sure your hostname is set to 127.0.0.1 or a similar local address in /etc/hosts.

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#8 2010-03-21 20:14:40

zebulone
Member
Registered: 2009-09-19
Posts: 8

Re: KDE unstable in fresh installation.

Pierre wrote:

You didn't mention a lot of details.

As admitted - for having no clue where to look for the problem. Posting *all* my config-files seemed no good idea wink. I could of course temporarily install some debug-packages to get a trace for the KDE errors if you meant that.

I know failure-guessing for newbies is no big fun - so the more thanks for giving me some point to start. I'll check the kdm start and the hosts-file later tonight and report back.

(Starting kdm as a daemon I was following the Official Installation Guide BTW that describes it as equally easy as the inittab-method.)

Last edited by zebulone (2010-03-21 20:17:10)

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#9 2010-03-21 20:21:31

Pierre
Developer
From: Bonn
Registered: 2004-07-05
Posts: 1,964
Website

Re: KDE unstable in fresh installation.

This is the only "official" install guide and it does not cover kdm setup at all: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Off … tall_Guide

It might be some kind of taste if you use the inittab or daemon method; but there were a lot of reports that the deamon method causes problems; and it's also not the cleanest way as runlevel 3 shouldn't start X.

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#10 2010-03-21 21:42:01

zebulone
Member
Registered: 2009-09-19
Posts: 8

Re: KDE unstable in fresh installation.

Pierre wrote:

This is the only "official" install guide and it does not cover kdm setup at all: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Off … tall_Guide

True. Sorry, it was the "Official Arch Linux Install Guide Appendix" and it only linked here.

Also make sure your hostname is set to 127.0.0.1 or a similar local address in /etc/hosts.

It looked like:

127.0.0.1     localhost.localdomain localhost myhost

while rc.conf said:

HOSTNAME="vmarch"

I added "vmarch" in /etc/hosts by hand:

127.0.0.1     localhost.localdomain localhost myhost vmarch

Ok?

It might be some kind of taste if you use the inittab or daemon method; but there were a lot of reports that the deamon method causes problems; and it's also not the cleanest way as runlevel 3 shouldn't start X.

I changed to the inittab-method as described in the section linked above.

Then I rebooted. First I tried the "launcher" feature [Alt+F2] that had crashed before and it worked - but as soon as I started some file operations like moving something to the trashcan or unpacking something with Ark CPU-usage went up to 100% again and stayed there for minutes rendering the system mostly unusable. I had to restart dolphin, the "launcher" was totally gone etc.

May it be the disk encryption? I followed this guide. Shouldn't there be hundreds of users with similar setups? What's wrong with mine?

Thanks for the help so far however!

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#11 2010-03-22 01:54:34

schen
Member
Registered: 2009-06-06
Posts: 468

Re: KDE unstable in fresh installation.

zebulone, take out "myhost" in /etc/hosts, but still keep vmarch.

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