[Kde-kiosk] kwin

[Tilo Renz]

Hello,

I have a problem with kwin in a kiosk environment: kwin terminates unexpected.
I already browsed the kde Changelog and this mailing-list, but didnt find something similar. I hope this is the right place for this kind of problem.

In case of error, the Phone-Support-Team tells us, no errors where shown, just the desktop isn't working any longer.
If we check the processlist on the faulty machine, no kwin-Process is found. Restarting kde solves the problem temporary.

Our Environment is a Opensuse 10.3-based Distribution deployed on about 500 Machines, spread across the country.
kwin --version gives
Qt: 3.3.8
KDE: 3.5.7 "release 72.6"
KWin: 3.0

We have a stripped down Desktop Profile with kicker showing the taskbar and clockapplet, but without K-Menu. All needed Programs are started with Desktop-Links. Direct File Access-Actions etc. are disabled.

This error is hard to track, because it doesn't happen regularly and didn't show up in previous tests. We have systems running without problems for over 35 days. But the problem occurs on an average of 20 Systems per day. :-(

Our current workaround is a cron-Job checking the process Table for a running kwin, and eventually restarting kwin.
But as we plan to extend our deployment to some thousand hosts and also want to use them for several years, we prefer a solution over the workaround.

Here are my qestions:
- How can I gather more Information about the running (and probably stopping or stopped) kwin? 
- Running inside gdb seems impossible, and I don't have physical access to the machines. How can I enable the creation of coredumps, if kwin crashes? (Althoug I'm not sure if it crashes or just terminates)
- Is there a possibility to turn on extended or debug-Level Logging? (Not on all machines, I hope a small subset will suffice to spot the error)
- Maybe the problem isn't a kwin-Problem, but general kde or kiosk-related. Suggestions?


thanks in advance,
Joey5337
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