4.6.2 early report

Sun Apr 10 06:56:17 BST 2011

On Sunday, April 10, 2011 01:20:50 AM Duncan did opine:

> 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!

Doing it differently this time, I just did a 'cat *' in that directory and 
it all went flying by, with no errors showing in the scroll back.  With 
fsck working silently, I have no clue if it fixed anything or not.  When it 
was done, the /home/lost+found directory was empty.

> 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.

Having carved lots of code, but on simpler systems, that is the 
difference..  I have no clue what the rules are for whatever language this 
stuff is written in.  I am moderately conversant in bash, C, and assembly 
for 1802/Z80/6x09 cpu's plus Basic09.  No c++, pascal, only a taste of 
lisp, and of course ARexx, even selling some of that in the amiga days.

> 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.

That may be part of the problem, it was running when I blew away the whole 
.kde4 tree.  Next time, I will add a 3 to the kernel boot line and do it 
from a shell login.  With X no longer responding to the infamous 
ctl+alt+backspace, it can be a right PIMA to get it killed otherwise.

> > 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've had to kill a wild copy of it twice more since that post.  It will be 
restarted in a few minutes, and will behave itself for a few hours, then 
blow up again.  I believe kdeinit is probably its parent.  Right now amanda 
is running & even that with its 3 or 4 copies of tar & gzip running, the 
machine isn't lagging.  This really bogs it down when it happens but it 
doesn't heat the cpu like amanda does, by about 5C.

> I don't know about that one.

ISTR I filed a fuss about that back when kde4 was new, don't recall what 
they did with the report.

> 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.

I "think" am using whatever pclos defaults to, sound is working fine except 
for low gain at times, but not very much of pulse is installed.  I haven't 
seen a fuss about missing devices at boot time in several months.  I could 
have switched things around back when it was being a PIMA though, and don't 
recall what I did now. Both the motherboard audio and the not bonded out 
audio in the video card I have blacklisted.  I have a pci Audigy2 Value 
card for sound.

Thanks Duncan.  Its time for a PB&(sugarless) jelly 2 am snack & some zz's 
around here.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
<http://tinyurl.com/ddg5bz>
<http://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html>
I cannot conceive that anybody will require multiplications at the rate
of 40,000 or even 4,000 per hour ...
		-- F. H. Wales (1936)
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