[kde-linux] Window Borders Have Dissapeared

[Steve O'Neill]

On Tue, 18 Dec 2007, david wrote:

> Steve O'Neill wrote:
> > On Tue, 18 Dec 2007, david wrote:
> >
> >> Steve O'Neill wrote:
> >>> On Wed, 19 Dec 2007, Andrew Walbran wrote:
> >>>
> >>>> On Wed, 19 Dec 2007 6:42:14 am Sylviane et Perry White wrote:
> >>>>> On Monday 17 December 2007 20:58, Steve O'Neill wrote:
> >>>>>> 3. All the windows I open seem to want to open up in the lower right
> >>>>>> corner. Because I can't move the windows, it's become impossible to use
> >>>>>> the Control Center to modify any of the window properties or set up more
> >>>>>> than one desktop.
> >>>>> No idea how to bring back the borders on your windows but have you tried
> >>>>> moving them with:
> >>>>> keep left alt key pressed, left click in the window, keep mouse button
> >>>>> pressed and drag.
> >>>> If that does not work, try opening Konsole and typing 'kwin &'. I suspect that
> >>>> the KDE window manager has not been started for some reason; that will start
> >>>> it. If it does not start with that command, the output it gives could be
> >>>> useful in debugging the problem.
> >>> Here's what I get when I do this:
> >>>
> >>> kwin: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/libkdeinit_kwin.so: undefined symbol:
> >>> _ZNK11NETRootInfo24desktopLayoutOrientationEv
> >>>
> >>> Obviously, kwin _isn't_ running(confirmed by look with 'ps').  I suspect one
> >>> of the packages I installed has caused this, but I don't know which one.  I've
> >>> already found one official PCLinuxOS package that doesn't work because of an
> >>> undefined symbol in the program; there may be others.  It looks like I'm going
> >>> to have to re-install the system and build it back up piece by piece until I
> >>> find the package that's causing the problem.  Fortunately, I'm not dependent
> >>> of this distro for any "real" uses yet, so all this will cost me is a bit of
> >>> time.  Thanks to everyone for all your help.
> >> My wife's been using that distro on her production laptop ever since it
> >> came out - with no problems whatever. What packages did you find that
> >> had that undefined symbol problem? Might just be a package maintainers
> >> glitch that could be easily fixed.
> >
> > Well, the first time I had an undefined symbol problem was when I installed
> > "evince-0.8.0-1".  The installation went ok, but, as soon as I ran the
> > program, I got an "undefined symbol" message and it wouldn't run.  It's quite
> > possible that the problem isn't in 'evince' itself, but in one of the
> > libraries that's been upgraded by installing other packages.  The problem is,
> > I installed a lot of packages from the repo before before I hit this window
> > problem, so if this kind of error is all coming from one or a few libraries, I
> > have no idea how to pin down the source of it at this stage of the game.  I
> > suspcet that your wife hasn't had any problems because of the her selection of
> > packages. If this is so, then it might only be a matter of time before she
> > hits the problem as she adds or updates packages.
>
> I think we've ADDed maybe two packages since installing it on her
> laptop. And updates from the PCLinuxOS repository have been happening
> without any problems, so my guess is whatever caused the problem, it
> isn't any of the packages currently on her system.

Most likely.  The only advice I would give is to be very careful when
installing packages from the repository.  A lot of them are updates and are
dependent on the package manager installing updates of other packages,
particularly libraries.  Any time that happens, there's a chance that some
program in your system is going to wind up out of sync with a library.  So, as
much as a pain in the butt it is, the safest move is probably to thoroughly
check your existing programs for functionality after installing an updated
package.  The need for this doesn't speak well of the package maintenance
system PCLinuxOS uses.


>
> > I'd like to be able to pin
> > the problem down myself; since I have lots of room on my drive, I might just
> > do a new, 'clean' install of PCLinuxOS in another partition and experiment
> > with adding packages to see what kind of problems I run into.  If I get
> > anything solid, I post it here.
>
> That would be a good idea. Suggestion: Install VirtualBox and run your
> tests in a virtualbox. Then you can do a stock PCLinuxOS install and
> back up that image file - so it's easy to get back to stock for other
> tests. I'd start testing with evince, myself!

Thanks for the suggestion.  I may do it that way, since, as you point out,
keeping a pristine image of the system is easy to do under a virtual manager.
Now all I have to do is find a block of time to do the testing :-)

Steve O'Neill

>
> --
> David
> gnome at hawaii.rr.com
> authenticity, honesty, community
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