KDE 4.6.2 screensaver module crashes with fglrx 8.850

[Duncan]

Eric Griffith posted on Mon, 20 Jun 2011 15:02:52 -0400 as excerpted:

> And the plot thickens lol. Turning off compositing allowed me to access
> the screensaver module (from fglrx) and set a screensaver. Rebooted to
> change something in windows, when I came back into KDE just out of a
> random whim I loaded up screensaver again, with compositing enabled, and
> it worked. If any of the KDE devs took a notice to this thread and could
> give a bit from information or suggestions other than testing out other
> versions of KDE (DL'ing some live CD's now) it seems that Screensaver
> crashes with fglrx if there isn't a screensaver set already, once it one
> is set though, everything's fine. So is there a bool value being used
> for whether one is or is not set? or an int that says which screensaver
> is set that starts off as null?
> 
> Just taking shots in the dark since I know some C++ but I doubt enough
> to effectively debug this.

I thought about mentioning this in the previous reply, but forgot as I 
was in the middle of one of the other suggestions when I thought about 
it, and it was gone when I was ready for it. =:^(

Anyway...

Unlike gnome with its near-windows-registry-editor-like config editor, 
kde's config remains plain text files -- tho with a runtime cache called 
ksycoca (Kde SYstem COnfig CAche), a daemon (kded) that among other 
things, is supposed to trigger cache updates when the text-based config 
files get edited, and a command-line app, kbuildsycoca4, that can be used 
to manually trigger a cache update or full rebuild.

So, it's possible to use a normal text editor to edit kde's config, with 
most of the files being *.ini style (section titles in [], individual 
setting=value lines grouped into the sections, blank lines for 
readability and initial-# lines as comments).  Of course, it's best to do 
so when the app in question (or all of kde) isn't running, so the app 
picks up the new config when it starts and doesn't overwrite it with an 
old one when it shuts down.

Most settings are under $KDEHOME, which defaults to ~/.kde (some distros 
change that to ~/.kde4) if the environmental variable isn't set.  A few 
are under $XDG_CONFIG_HOME or $XDG_DATA_HOME (by default ~/.config and 
XDG_CONFIG_HOME/local/share, respectively).  For the $KDEHOME settings, 
most are to be found under either $KDEHOME/share/apps or $KDEHOME/share/
config, apps consisting of per-app subdirs, config consisting of 
individual app *rc files.

Knowing that, it's possible to look in those dirs and see if you find 
anything that looks like the screensaver config.  (One can also use strace 
-feopen applicationname app-params in a konsole window to get a trace 
listing of all files the app tries to open, but there's a LOT to sort 
thru, grep is your friend.  That's actually how I found the config and 
apps dirs in the first place, back in the kde3 era. =:^)  Checking the 
dirs just now, here, this is looks like the file you're looking for:

$KDEHOME/share/config/kscreensaverrc

It looks like you could simply edit that, provided of course that you had 
a working config you could copy from another system, or ask for here, if 
necessary.  It appears that the setting in question is the Saver= line.

But now that you have it working...

FWIW, the $KDEHOME directory has a corresponding system version, probably 
set by the distro at build-time but it's /usr/share/config, here.  Many 
apps have a system default *rc file there, but it appears kscreensaver 
isn't one of them.  If it did and the default was set to something simply 
like blank, may well have prevented your problem, since the setting 
wouldn't have been null/optimized-out.

-- 
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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