I just noticed: no more crashes! Thanks, KDE team!

[Alex Schuster]

Duncan writes:

> Alex Schuster posted on Wed, 03 Aug 2011 00:47:14 +0200 as excerpted:

> > Some kde4init stuff always crashes short after login, but it
> > does not seem to matter much. Dolphin crashed today without apparent
> > cause, which is somewhat annoying because in this case all instances
> > crash, and always have two Dolphins with a total of six views. And
> > right now one Dophin is acting weird, one panel does not update when
> > I scroll or select stuff. Another one showed an empty directory, I
> > need to press F5 to see its contents. But at least some weird
> > drag&drop problem seems to be solved, files got marked afterwards as
> > if the mouse button was pressed.
> 
> Why are you using so many dolphins?

Because I am using them quite often. One is on my desktop for multimedia 
stuff, with one tab showing my music files, and another tab with my videos. 
Both have two views/panels, one showing the main directory, the other 
showing the incoming folder where new stuff arrives. I often download small 
video clips, they end up in /data/mpeg/Clips/incoming, and after I watched 
them I move them into one of many categories. I also use the command line 
for many things, even for file management (sometimes also using mx/Midnight 
Commander), but when it comes to multimedia stuff, I prefer something 
graphical. Dolphin is a nice tool for this, it shows thumbnails, lets me 
change the sort order easily. It is grouped to a Konsole window (I cannot 
say often enough how much I love this kwin feature), so there is not much 
space wasted, and most of the time those windows are minimized to the title 
bar anyway.
See http://www.wonkology.org/comp/desktop/2011-07-24/desktop2-1.png , or 
http://www.wonkology.org/comp/desktop/2011-07-24/ for images of all my 
desktops.

Another Dolphin on another desktop isn't being used that often. It's also 
grouped to a Konsole with multiple tabs, so most of the time I don't see it, 
but I like to have it handy in case I need it.

As long as Dolphin doesn't crash, it's great. If only this drag&drop problem 
I mentioned above were fixed. It seems to happen less often now with 4.7, 
but it's not gone yet. And I often see weird update problems now, like here:
http://www.wonkology.org/comp/kde/dolphin-weirdness.png


> Dolphin doesn't really seem to be
> designed for that sort of use -- if it was, it'd have options (as does
> konqueror, performance section in the config) both to have separate
> windows use separate instances (the memory settings, minimize memory uses
> threads on the same instance so if one crashes they all do, while never
> minimize forces separate instances for each window, so if one crashes,
> it's just that window gone), and to keep instances preloaded, so they
> don't take long to launch.

So KDE's default file manager is not meant to be used in multiple instances? 

> Or alternatively, do something like I do and use mc for sysadmin work,
> and gwenview for images and video, so there isn't much left for dolphin
> to actually do -- it's basically an enhanced file-open dialog, and as
> such, it doesn't generally stay open that long anyway.

I use mc sometimes, but I do most admin tasks directly on the command line.
Gwenview for images and videos? I just tried that.. oh dear, no, NO!!!1 I 
thought Gwenview would not be the best utility for this, but, sorry, it is 
totally unusable.

First, I like to move files between the two Dolphin panels. Gwenview shows 
files in a directory nicely, fine. But I like the detailed view, so I can 
see the full file name. Gwenview shows the file name in the same size as the 
thumbnail, I have to enlarge the thumbnails in order to see longer parts of 
the file name, but then I can display few files only. I checked the view 
menu, if there is a 'detailed view', but I only see thumbnail options, where 
I can select things like the date. When I select the date, Gwenview crashes, 
every time. So I try to sort files by date - not ideal, because I like to 
see _which_ date. But again, Gwenview crashes. Next thing I tried was to 
open another Gwenview, and to drag a file from to the other Gwenview. 
Drag&drop acts a little weird, I usually just drag a file and press the 
shift key, so the file would be moved. That does not work, I always get the 
menu asking whether to move or copy. Oh, even when I do not press the shift 
key, I drag the file with the mouse button pressed, release, and nothing 
happens until I press the button again.
And what happens then? I get a notification that a file is already existing.  
But it is not the file I dragged, no, it's the first file of the destination 
folder what would be overwritten with itself.

So, I just tried some things I never did before, and in two minutes I found 
two bugs that always crash Gwenview, and I cannot move files around between 
Gwenviews. Thanks, but I'll stay with Dolphin. And even if this would work, 
Dolphin uses much less space than the Gwenview windows, and shows more 
information, like longer file names, date. And it lets me sort things.


> > Oh, and the Amarok constantly uses 70% or one of my two cores. But it
> > doesn't crash :)

That was the Amalymp II script. It shows lyrics in karaoke style, I never 
used it, but I had it activated after the last Amarok upgrade to 2.4.3.

> The last time I booted with akonadi, after I had migrated away from kmail
> (the only thing I had that used it) but was still using akregator, so I
> couldn't kill USE=semantic-desktop and unmerge the whole kit-n-kaboodle
> as I eventually did, despite the fact that I had nothing actually needing
> akonadi any longer and I've no idea what caused it to load, it started
> using 97% of one core.  Luckily I have four cores so one single-threaded
> endless-loop doesn't really affect me that much, but when I saw that, I
> tried to terminate (SIGTERM) it.  Only it wouldn't terminate, I had to
> SIGKILL it.

I often see processes like akonadi_imap_re eating CPU time, not constantly, 
but it's enough to make large videos drop frames (dual core AMD 4650e @ 
2.5GHz here). But I keep using it. Thunderbird does not show new mails and I 
don't knwo why, and I was not happy with Claws when I tried it once, so I 
decided I'll just wait for things to become better. 

> 
> Even tho I was actively searching for an akregator replacement in ordered
> to get kdepim and thus the semantic-desktop junk off my system entirely,
> that was enough akonadi misbehavior for me, and I deleted /usr/bin/
> akonadiserver, added it to (PKG_)INSTALL_MASK and remerged the akonadi-
> server package and restarted kde, just to be sure I didn't get any funny
> errors.  I didn't, and the irritating warning about nepomuk being off
> went away as well.  The headers or whatever might have been needed for
> kdepim-common-libs, thus the dependency, but the binary certainly wasn't,
> and if it was going to be so rude as to take all available CPU on a core
> when I didn't even need it, it was going to get terminated and removed
> from my system, WITH PREJUDICE!
> 
> Of course, at that time I didn't know that within about 12 hours, before
> I restarted kde again, I'd have settled on a replacement for akregator,
> got it setup, and unmerged both akregator and since that was the last
> kdepim app I was running, all of the kdepim libraries, plus akonadi-
> server, etc, as well.  And after it was gone I could finally kill
> USE=semantic-desktop and remerge kdelibs, dolphin, etc, without it.

Hooray :) I read about your efforts to make this work, I'm glad you finally 
sorted it out.

> As I said, the system feels lighter and faster, now! =:^)  Maybe I'll try
> semantic-desktop stuff again... someday... when even the disposable paygo
> phones are a dozen-core-plus and come with half a terabyte of RAM! =:^)

Yes, I also have the impression that my system if becoming too old to use 
KDE, and that I should get a better one if I like to run it.

	Wonko
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