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<p>I decided to try out the 8.0.0 pre-release AppImage on the three
machines on which I use digiKam, because I was unable to run 7.9.0
or 7.10.0 on these machines because it kept segfaulting.</p>
<p>I eventually was able to get digiKam to launch on all three
machines, but there was some bumps and challenges along the way
which I am sharing here because this might be useful to the
developers, and because it would be interesting to hear if others
have run into similar issues.</p>
<p>On laptop1, digiKam started, but it took several minutes to start
up each time, during most of which the splash screen was
displaying "Loading tools..." and the app appeared to be talking
to the database an awful lot. The first time seemed longer. Strace
output from that first invocation (access to thumbnails DB) seemed
to suggest that perhaps it was regenerating all thumbnails on
startup.<br>
<br>
On laptop2, the first time I started it, it did nothing for
several minutes and then popped up a message which said, "You have
insufficient privileges on the database. Following privileges are
not assigned to you: [this is blank, no privileges are listed]
Check your privileges on the database and restart digiKam."<br>
<br>
The second time, it got to the splash screen, but got stuck there
for a very long time, like a half hour, much longer than on
laptop1. Judging by what showed up in top and strace, there were
short bursts where the digikam process was busy and talking to the
database, interspersed with longer periods during which it was
idle while waiting for something. The timestamp on my
thumbnails-digikam.db file kept getting updated, so I suspect that
it was rebuilding the thumbnail database, in which case the delays
may have been lags talking to the fileserver that the pictures are
on. Having said that, I'm not sure why the delays are so much
longer on this machine than on the other machine that was also
doing this over WiFi to the same fileserver, unless for some
reason this particular laptop has slower connectivity to the
fileserver than the other one. This does seem possible since I
noticed when mounting the filesystem on this machine that the
mount took much longer.<br>
</p>
<p>Also on laptop2, the splash screen is much smaller than it should
be and the fonts on the splash screen are so small that they are
virtually unreadable. I thought this might be an Xorg fractional
scaling issue since that's a new feature and I believe still
experimental, but I turned off fractional scaling and restarted
digiKam and saw the same issue, and then I logged out and logged
back in with Wayland and again saw the same issue.<br>
<br>
When it finally started up, it popped up the dialog telling me it
needed to download facial recognition files, but clicking the
"Download" button seemed to have no effect at least for a while,
and GNOME kept popping up its ""digikam" is not responding, Force
Quit / Wait" dialog window. The download finally happened and then
the main window interface was responsive.<br>
<br>
The third time I started up digiKam on laptop2, it still took a
while at "Loading tools..." but much less time and the timestamp
on my thumbnails DB wasn't being updated. Other things I noticed:<br>
</p>
<ul>
<li>After the splash screen went away there was like a 15-second
delay before the main window came up.</li>
<li>After closing the main window there was like a 15-second delay
before the digikam process (which I launched by executing the
AppImage file) fully exited.<br>
</li>
</ul>
<p>Finally, on my primary desktop computer, which is connected to
the fileserver via cable rather than wifi and therefore has much
faster connectivity, digiKam started up fast without any apparent
issue. Since I've run digiKam here more recently than on the
laptops, it's possible that the thumbnail database didn't need to
rebuild here, i.e., my suspicion that there was something in the
upgrade to 8.0.0 that caused the thumbnail DB to need rebuilding
may be incorrect.</p>
<p>Hope this is useful.</p>
<p> jik</p>
<p><br>
</p>
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