Me too: "Kprinter has stopped working - Unable to startchildprintprocess "

[Cristian Tibirna]

On 6 February 2007 15:26, Kurt Pfeifle wrote:
>
> I have noticed a *lot* of files with the following scheme for their
> names, all in $HOME of the said user:
>
>    .DCOPserver_myhostname_:NNN -> .DCOPserver_myhostname__NNN
>    .DCOPserver_myhostname__NNN
>
> (where the filename with the ":" was always a symlink pointing to the
> one with the replacement "_", and where "NNN" was a figure ranging
> from "0" to "255").
>

These are handles for the DCOP server communication that each full KDE session 
must have in order to run correctly (with functional DCOP). The number is 
associated with the NNN'th _simultaneous_ session that you start in the same 
host, as the same user (you can do this in many ways: running many X sessions 
at the physical console -- just what KDM allows since KDE-3.? -- or by 
launching multiple remote sessions to (xdmcp etc.) to the same machine.

The handle gets destroied at dcopserver termination.

Multiple files can also get created when your previous session's dcop server 
doesn't die properly at a logout, leaving opened the handle (lock) files.

It might be that something denied your dcop servers to die properly on logout  
so you ended up with all the possible files already taken.

This explains why other users printed correctly. Yet, this doesn't explain why 
your KDE session functioned at all.

It _might_ be a general KDE bug (although is would have gotten reported in big 
numbers). I believe it's rather a bad distro patch somewhere.

-- 
Cristian Tibirna
KDE developer .. tibirna at kde.org .. http://www.kde.org