Plasma hangs, could not log in

[Alex Schuster]

Anne Wilson writes:

> On Wednesday, July 20, 2011 04:32:55 PM Alex Schuster wrote:
> > Anne Wilson writes:
> > > Recently I had a similar experience, in that the bootup sequence
> > > never finished.
> > 
> > Did you also get the black screen, and nothing else happened from then
> > on?
> 
> No, in my case KDE started to load - I saw the icons begin to appear, but
> when it got to the K icon it just stuck there.

Um, the icons of the splash screen? The last one is the big K here. Yes, it 
was stuck there, unless I waited for some minutes, or did some mouse clicks. 
And then all I got was a black screen.

[removing ~/.kde]
> > I hate to do this. Sure, it would help, as I was able to log in with a
> > test user, but configuring things back as they were takes quite a
> > while. And I didn't know beforehand it would take so long. I hoped
> > I'd find the problem soon, remove the offending program or plasmoid,
> > and all would be fine. I had similar problems in the past, and could
> > solve them this way. Like the dreaded bug that made the password
> > dialog useless when it was set to display three stars per key
> > pressed.
> > Then I would report the bug, someone would fix it, and it would never
> > happen again. The problem was that it does not look like there's a
> > single plasmoid being responsible for this, which was unexpected.
> 
> I talked with the Fedora packagers, and we went through such things as
> clearing out caches, but to no avail.  There comes a time when getting a
> serviceable desktop as quickly as possible is the imperative.  I would
> much prefer to have found the cause, but my friends at Fedora agreed that
> we had tried everything that stood a good chance of telling us something
> useful, so I made the decision to get back to work.

If I had needed my PC to do important things, I'd either logged into another 
window manager, or moved the .kde directory temporarily so I could work and 
investigate later. But I like to solve these problems soon, if not they tend 
to stack up :)

> > > > Ctrl-C in the Akregator main tab does not work. Akregator
> > > > makes Kontact crash about four times per day.
> > > 
> > > Check for updates.  I saw that a while back, but it doesn't happen
> > > now, so it's almost certainly version or distro-version specific.
> > 
> > The Ctrl-C thing?
> 
> No, the constant crashes.  It drove me wild for a while, but it's OK now.

Interesting, it's become much worse here, 2-5 Kontact crashes per day due to 
Akregator. Not long ago, this did not happen on a daily basis. Maybe it's 
since I am using KDE 4.6.5? Or could it be because I mainly use the Webkit 
engine now?
The most annoying thing about this is that I lose the from: and the subject: 
headers in mails I am currently composing. Akregator restores the session 
fine. If it doesn't happen more often, I can live with this. It's annoying, 
but worse tings happen here.

> > > Many of those things have already been addressed.  Yes, any
> > > database that attempts to index everything is going to be big. 
> > > The KMail issue, though, I consider to be more serious.  I take
> > > it that you are using the experimental KMail2?
> > 
> > Right. I thought it was considered stable by the KDE folks? I'm
> > running the ~amd64 branch of packagers, that is, they are not well
> > tested on Gentoo Linux, but are considered stable by upstream. At
> > least that's how I understand it.
> 
> No, it is considered stable enough for early adopters to do the final
> testing - and there have been many more problems than the devs had
> experienced themselves.  It has been suggested that deleting any existing
> Akonadi database might help in a lot of cases.  It seems that people have
> tried the pre- releases and may well have some incompatibilities hanging
> around from those earlier releases, but I assume that this is not the
> case for you.

This may be the case, I once had the new KDEPIM stuff running for a day, I 
think it was being unmasked accidentally. But meanwhile I deleted and re-
created all Akonadi resources.
After dealing with this for a while now, I'm getting used to it. And I know 
what to do in case of problems. This morning, for example, KMail did not 
show any mails, and I had to restart both Akonadi and KMail until it worked 
again. 


> > > I understand that IMAP and DIMAP have been merged,
> > > and I assume that that means DIMAP (downloaded) in every case. 
> > > I'm not too happy about that myself.
> > 
> > Well, at least it gives me a backup in case my IMAP provider's server
> > dies, or when I'm offline. I was just surprised about the amount of
> > data, when my backup partition ran full due to some extra gigabytes
> > that were needed. And the backup runs much longer now. But it's a
> > minor problem, I can well live with that.
> 
> Yes, it would be nice to know these things before-hand - would save a lot
> of worrying and wondering.

Yeah, a little dialog window informing me, and it would have been fine. But 
what I got during the first start was some Akonadi migration message 
windows, some showing errors, that vanished after a little while before I 
made screenshots.

BTW: I had some trouble sending this mail, it was stuck in the outbox. I got 
all kinds of weird messages (SMTP server does not support PLAIN, no 
connection to KDE-wallet, and others). I restarted KMail, I restarted 
Akonadi, I logged out and in again... but only when Thunderbird showed 
similar symptoms, I checked if something was wrong with the IMAP server. And 
it was indeed, it had a load of 550. KDE was not to blame, but I'm so used 
to KMail probelms now, it did not come to my mind that the problem was 
elsewhere...

	Wonko
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