earth tech

It seems clear to me at this point that the desktop is going to have to be KDE, and (in this case, now) KDE4, in particular.

The bottom line is simply this: the KDE widget set has the widgets I want, and it works more consistently than e.g. GNOME.

This blog has been down for days because the gnome-panel has decided to - each time it is launched - go into an infinite loop which hogs something around 100% of the processor cycles, and will not stop until it is killed with a 'pkill -9 gnome-panel'.

Now, I know this problem with GNOME has something to do with the stored configuration, but I have been unable to determine just exactly which aspect of the GNOME configuration is causing the problem.

Furthermore, once I realized that GNOME was not healing itself, and was in fact doing everything in its power to prevent me from using the computer at all, I tried to switch back to KDE. That effort took down the whole X server config, starting with the session login manager - neither kdm nor gdm would work, and gdm wouldn't even start.

After a brief flirtation with wdm, I took the fallback to xdm - which sort of worked, but wouldn't start an X session until I re-installed both GDM and KDM.

Having been through all that, I was so relieved to see the KDE desktop again I haven't changed it since.

Now, in between all this, I have also found that FVWM as installed by OpenSuSE does not come configured - the "out of the box" configuration is simply a black screen (arguably an improvement over the miore-effect tiling that is the X default) with the default, built-in root menu available using the right mouse button on the black desktop. After screwing around with the FVWM config - and since I did not have my archived FVWM configuration immediately available, I tried to switch to a different - I.E. non-FVWM session - which is when I discovered that the session configurations were hosed. Specifically, when I logged in to the FVWM session, something in the session manager config got changed, and there was no non-trivial way to change it back.

The really unfortunate part of all this is that I do not have a "fix" to present here. This is all just a problem description, and fails to even adequately define the problem in reproducible terms.

I will, in the course of getting this desktop environment to a usable state, try to generate some more coherent bug reports and/or workarounds to the problems that keep coming up.

Meanwhile, KDE4 is going to be "it" - I expect it

a) to be simpler to configure for user-friendly day-to-day use

b) to be more robust once configured

c) to provide a widget set tailored for my needs

FVWM is more configurable, and arguably more powerful for detailed, perhaps non-standard, configuration items, but tends to be less intuitive in its default modes, and more tedious to bring into compliance with the Windows-like look and feel which GNOME and KDE have shown to be so popular.

In short, I will provide KDE as a baseline desktop, with customizations purpose-built using FVWM (these will typically be for dedicated accounts).

Finally: I think I like KDE3 better than KDE4. All my transparent widgets from KDE3 have gone opaque in KDE4, and the glassy, glossy radioactive eye-candy from KDE3 is toned way down - at least in the default versions. I have some screenshots of each which I will link here (once I find the URLs) that should highlight some of the differences.

Labels: display manager, GNOME, kde, KDE4, linux, x

posted by pd wilson   #   23:27

Apparenlty the prooblem with Konqueror dying trying to load the Blogger.com Dashboard was temporary. This post is made using Konqueror 3.5.2 (KDE 3.5.2). It appears that the problem may have had somewhat to do with the Spell Checker problems I was trying to post about earlier (at the time the Konqueor crash occurred.

The problem then was that Konqueror as configured by default under Knoppix 5.0.1 was still using the German language dictionary for spell-checking, even though I had changed the KDE language preference to US English (US-EN) using the KDE Kicker panel [I.E. "toolbar"] widget.

I have since restarted KDE (due to some problems that seemed to have been caused by my moving the system /tmp directory to an internal drive partition while KDE was still running) and Konqueror starts up and runs and has not [yet] crashed on the Blogger Dashboard interface.

The earlier crash which killed Konqueror for the duration of that KDE session occurred after the problems with the spell checker manifested, and after I clicked the Save Now button to save the post. The Save Now button did not "depress" at that time, and no draft of the message was saved. Immediately after the save operation failed is when I clicked the Dashboard link, which is what caused Konqueror to crash.

Note that at this time, the spell checker does not seem to be working at all in Konqueror (the Auto Spell Check option is checked, and the Check Spelling context menu command does nothing), and that

1. There is no "typeahead" pattern matching in the tags field of the blogger.com Posting interface as there is with Firefox v2.x
2. The layout of the blogger.com Posting interface in Konqueror is munged - there is a large whitespace block below the text entry area, between the bottom edge of the HTML textarea element and the the bottom edge of the boarder which encloses the HTML element. (above the Post Options link, the Labels (sic) [tags] entry field, Publish Post and Save Now buttons, etc.

Labels: blogger, crash, kde, konqueror, linux, v3.5.2

posted by pd wilson   #   06:42

This is to correct a statement I made previously in a post on this log [earth tech] about KNOPPIX and the audio capability on the HP Pavilion a220n.

The audio input does in fact work under the KNOPPIX 5.0.1 LiveCD release. I missed this because, while the audio output worked fine once the audio sub-system was enabled via the KDE Control Center | Sounds & Multimedia | Sound System control panel, the mic input levels were defaulting to zero, so no singal was being captured.

Links:

• Knoppix
• The K Desktop Environment (KDE)
• HP Pavilion a220n

Labels: a220n, audio, errata, hp, kde, linux, pavilion, sound

posted by pd wilson   #   05:44

Konqueror is :

1. Hanging while waiting for blogger.com to "Publish" a blog post.
2. Crashing; Konqueror will crash if - while the "publish" operation is in its infinite refresh loop, loading and reloading the "Please wait while your page is published" message page - the user
   1. opens another Konqueror window
   2. goes to view the blog in the new window [note that the post which initiated the publish operation has been posted - the post has uploaded and the blog has been updated, despite the braindead infinite loop the first window of Kongqueror is stuck in]
   3. goes back to the first window [where the ininfinite refresh loop is going on]
   4. clicks on the Blogger Dashboard link there, in the first window, while the infinite refresh loop is going on

Other info from the Crash Handler:

• Konqueror [crashed and] threw SIGILL.
• "The application was asked to save its documents"

Default browser indentification string for this version of Konqueror [note that I have broken the line below at the backslash]:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/3.5; Linux 2.6.17; X11; i686; en_US)\
 KHTML/3.5.2 (like Gecko) (Debian package 4:3.5.2-2+b1)

Here is the backtrace data from the crash handler:

(no debugging symbols found)
Using host libthread_db library "/lib/tls/libthread_db.so.1".
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[Thread debugging using libthread_db enabled]
[New Thread -1231935808 (LWP 4267)]
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[KCrash handler]
#5  0x08f95edc in ?? ()
#6  0xb62d57ae in DOM::checkChild () from /usr/lib/libkhtml.so.4
#7  0xb629e96c in DOM::XMLAttributeReader::~XMLAttributeReader ()
   from /usr/lib/libkhtml.so.4
#8  0xb6268f9e in KHTMLPart::saveState () from /usr/lib/libkhtml.so.4
#9  0xb62289fe in KHTMLPartBrowserExtension::saveState ()
   from /usr/lib/libkhtml.so.4
#10 0xb6875b5f in KonqView::updateHistoryEntry ()
   from /usr/lib/libkdeinit_konqueror.so
#11 0xb6893a11 in KonqView::slotCompleted ()
   from /usr/lib/libkdeinit_konqueror.so
#12 0xb6893c23 in KonqView::slotCompleted ()
   from /usr/lib/libkdeinit_konqueror.so
#13 0xb689987d in KonqView::qt_invoke () from /usr/lib/libkdeinit_konqueror.so
#14 0xb72b8678 in QObject::activate_signal () from /usr/lib/libqt-mt.so.3
#15 0xb72b8fdc in QObject::activate_signal () from /usr/lib/libqt-mt.so.3
#16 0xb7f85e0a in KParts::ReadOnlyPart::completed ()
   from /usr/lib/libkparts.so.2
#17 0xb62581c0 in KHTMLView::timerEvent () from /usr/lib/libkhtml.so.4
#18 0xb72b5786 in QObject::event () from /usr/lib/libqt-mt.so.3
#19 0xb72f2b9a in QWidget::event () from /usr/lib/libqt-mt.so.3
#20 0xb724e87a in QApplication::internalNotify () from /usr/lib/libqt-mt.so.3
#21 0xb724f5f5 in QApplication::notify () from /usr/lib/libqt-mt.so.3
#22 0xb792502e in KApplication::notify () from /usr/lib/libkdecore.so.4
#23 0xb71e0001 in QApplication::sendEvent () from /usr/lib/libqt-mt.so.3
#24 0xb7240305 in QEventLoop::activateTimers () from /usr/lib/libqt-mt.so.3
#25 0xb71f3d2a in QEventLoop::processEvents () from /usr/lib/libqt-mt.so.3
#26 0xb7267255 in QEventLoop::enterLoop () from /usr/lib/libqt-mt.so.3
#27 0xb726717a in QEventLoop::exec () from /usr/lib/libqt-mt.so.3
#28 0xb724d38d in QApplication::exec () from /usr/lib/libqt-mt.so.3
#29 0xb68be17c in kdemain () from /usr/lib/libkdeinit_konqueror.so
#30 0xb7fb1524 in kdeinitmain () from /usr/lib/kde3/konqueror.so
#31 0x0804e1d6 in ?? ()
#32 0x00000004 in ?? ()
#33 0x080cff68 in ?? ()
#34 0x00000001 in ?? ()
#35 0x00000000 in ?? ()

Labels: blogger, crash, kde, knoppix, konqueror, linux, v3.5.2

posted by pd wilson   #   09:47