[kde-linux] Nspluginviewer

[David Baron]

On Tuesday 16 October 2007, kde-linux-request at kde.org wrote:
> On Monday 15 October 2007, David Baron wrote:
> > This goodie was hanging up today. Moving it out of the $KDEDIR/bin path
> > allowed konqueror to run normally and nothing seems to be missed.
> >
> > What is it and for what is it "needed"?
>
> nspluginviewer is a helper process for running "Netscape" browser plugins
> (the browser plugin API is still called Netscape) outside the Konqueror
> process.
>
> This allows Konqueror to be independent of any plugin's stability, i.e. if
> a plugin crashes or as in your case hangs, only the helper process will be
> affected but Konqueror itself will remain operational.

Thought so. 
>
> A recent plugin related issue is the bug in the Adobe Flash 9 plugin, which
> is triggered by a behavioral change in GTK2, resulting in nspluginviewer to
> consume 100% CPU time.
So now konqueror is disabled. I can still get to other programs but konqueror 
will not budge.

> Since unfortunately Adobe seems not to be interested in fixing this any
> time soon and since nobody else can fix the closed-source plugin, there is
> quite some debate on several distributions' bug tracking systems if and how
> to work around it, e.g. for Debian
> http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=443600
>
> It seems that the GTK packagers are now including a temporary work around
> until Adobe will eventually decide that Linux user should get at least a
> basic quality product again.
>
> Shows nicely how proprietary software is not in the interest of consumers
> :( Being at the mercy of an obviously merciless vendor.
This is not the only problem with gtk upgrades, unfortunately. Some of these 
problems relate to glib and gtk libraries that kde places as part of 
konstruct builds and these get loaded ahead of the ones on the distro. As I 
said, I would like to option to not have any of this stuff installed on 
$KDEDIR/lib if it is in the /usr/lib, et al.

Of course, in this case, nspluginviewer worked fine with konstruct's glib 
stuff and the hangup started when I moved those glib so's out of the way. 
There should be a way of handling all this using ldconfig (look in /usr/lib 
before $KDEDIR/lib) and preload stuff for specific apps but this is 
dangerous.