[kde-linux] Re: Loosing keyboard in KDE

[Duncan]

Klaus Vink Slott posted on Thu, 09 Jun 2011 10:44:28 +0200 as excerpted:

> You are right: My new installed version is indeed 4.6.00. I am not sure
> if it made any difference. but I decided to clean out the swamp of
> linked and cached files in /tmp and /var/tmp In runlevel 1 so nothing
> else was running it still took about 20 minutes to clean out these (rm
> -rf)  I really should put some cronjob to keep these from growing wild
> ;-)

FWIW, here, /tmp is a tmpfs, so rebooting (or umounting/mounting) clears 
it without further hassle.  I have plenty of RAM (6 gig on my 
workstation, down from 8 gig after a stick went bad, that I never 
bothered to replace, netbook maxed out at 1.5 gig, similarly sized for 
what I use it for), so no problems with that.

/var/tmp is actually a symlink to /tmp , altho that required a bit more 
work since by FHS standard, /var/tmp should in reality be /var/cache, and 
losing some of those caches over a reboot is... annoying.  But I was able 
to point the various caches I actually wanted to keep over a boot 
elsewhere and now /var/tmp is now as temporary as the name suggests, 
despite what the FHS has to say about it.

I did end up creating a script that I run from the local initscript 
service, that creates a few dirs, etc.  Given the race condition 
triggered security vulns on a multi-user system if predictable names are 
created in world-writable tmp, setting them up when the system is still 
initializing is a good idea.  Additionally, back when I was setting it up 
at least, X (and possibly kde, IDR the details) refused to create the 
names on its own, possibly due to the same risks.  So having the script 
create the dirs for me at boot, after /tmp is mounted but before I get a 
normal login prompt, solved several such issues at once.  And now it's 
all setup and I no longer have to worry about clearing tmp every so 
often.  (FWIW I compile and test direct Linus git kernels so only tend to 
accumulate a few days uptime, not enough to worry about needing to clean 
/tmp between boots.)

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman