4.6.2 early report

[Duncan]

gene heskett posted on Sat, 09 Apr 2011 14:04:24 -0400 as excerpted:

> On Saturday, April 09, 2011 01:44:30 PM Duncan did opine:
> 
>> gene heskett posted on Sat, 09 Apr 2011 10:06:47 -0400 as excerpted:
>> > On Saturday, April 09, 2011 09:56:58 AM Duncan did opine:
> 
> This then, brings up the 64k$ question:  Why is it not saving, and
> reusing, the settings I give it after a restart?
> 
> The results are apparently quite randomized.  This time, its fairly
> usable, but its a crap shoot what it will be next time, and seems to
> get worse, not better, with each succeeding hundred plus packages at
> a time kde update.

Well, I know this is repeating myself, but you've yet to confirm whether 
that fsck fixed the files that even root couldn't read.  If you have 
(literally) fscked config files that can't be properly read or written and 
that are corrupted who knows what way if they are read... you tell me what 
plasma and the rest of kde is supposed to make of it!

That's why I was so insistent on doing the fsck before getting serious 
about trying to fix anything else.

However, even apart from that, the experience I had with the screwed config 
here was close enough to what you're seeing... not entirely random, here, 
but getting worse each time, and nothing at all that could be done from 
the GUI to fix it, that I understand your frustration.

If you've enough technical reasoning ability and *LOTS* of patience and 
time, it's possible to hand-correct that file I mentioned.  However, it's 
not something I'd recommend that people try, because most folks either 
won't have the patience and time required, or won't have the technical 
ability to reason out the section dependency tree and figure out which 
parts belong and which parts to kill.  And if they get it wrong, it's not 
going to fix it but very very likely only make things even worse!

That's why my recommendation is to simply kill that file (and possibly the 
other plasma* files in the same dir) and let it start over with the 
defaults.  It's upto the person if they want to ignore that recommendation 
-- I'd certainly try fixing it by hand if it were me, and I did, and was 
able to fix it -- but my recommendation is to blow the file away and start 
from scratch, because it was rather hairier than I like, almost hairier 
than I could tolerate, and I know from experience that my tolerance for 
editing hand editing config files is WAY above average even for Gentoo, 
and the average Gentooer's tolerance for it is WAY above average compared 
to most distro users, since the ability and often necessity to hand-edit 
config files and customize far more than an ordinary distro, rather 
defines Gentoo.  So it WILL be more than most folks are going to be able 
to handle, and knowing that, the recommendation is simply to blow away the 
file and let kde create new and hopefully good, defaults.

But until the file is either fixed by hand or blown away, plasma is so 
hopelessly messed up that it doesn't know which end is up, and when it 
writes the data back, it's more screwed up than it was before!  So each 
time it starts it's more screwed up, because it tries to make sense of the 
screwed up data, fails, and writes back an even more screwed up config for 
the next time!

As I said, I was there, watching it happen to my system.  Once it gets 
that screwed up, the /only/ way to fix it is to manually clean up that 
file, either by working thru it and hoping you get lucky and interpret it 
close enough to correct to know what to delete from it, without making 
things worse yourself, or, recommended, by simply blowing it away (with 
plasma stopped when you do so it doesn't write back a bad config again), 
so it starts from what one can at least hope is sane defaults once again.

> Earlier this morning, I saw that another old kde4 bug was back, knotify4
> was eating one whole core of my phenom, keeping it heated to nearly 60C
> so I killed it.  But nothing has changed that I can tell.  It has since
> restarted itself while I was napping, and now seems to be using only a
> nominal amount of cpu & its back to about 47C.  Have there been
> complaints about that previously?  I used to have to kill it immediately
> after a restart just to get my machine back.

I don't know about that one.

The one thing I do know, in reference to kde4 sound, is that the phonon-
vlc backend works far better for me than the phonon-xine backend, and that 
my suggestion to switch to the phonon-vlc backend helped at least one 
other person.  OTOH, another person found that the phonon-gstreamer backend 
worked best for them, as isn't particularly surprising for those running 
gnome-based distros since gstreamer is the gnome sound technology.

But the problem with phonon-xine I had showed up rather differently, here 
(periodic complaints, especially at boot, about missing devices), and 
doesn't sound like it's related to your problem with the event-notifier.

-- 
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

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