unknown plasma crashes

By basd on Feb 3, 2009 | In kde4

Having a cool, stable, free desktop is pretty neat. Of course it results in nothing to post about.

...

I have developed a regular "plasma crash" at startup. But, I don't precisely have any idea what is crashing. Everything actually seems to be working fine.

(Well, in saying that I decided to check to make certain "effects" were working, which I don't use much, and they weren't, so I turned them back on. Maybe the effects setting is not saving properly.)

But anyhoo, the one thing I am experiencing is that several of my plasma widgets don't stay where I put them, so I have to rearrange my desktop on startup. I suspect that I should delete the .kde4 directory and rebuild the desktop, since I haven't done so since well before KDE 4.2. There may be some legacy issues hanging out in there. (Of course, it's always possible I could rebuild the whole thing and not solve any problems at all, still have the wandering about widgets.)

But, as my panels are fairly customized, rebuilding the desktop takes awhile (plus, I will forget things) so I'd rather not do it. I guess I will wait until the annoyance of moving widgets around exceeds the annoyance factor of rebuilding the desktop from scratch.

I do get a fair number of search on my website from people who are research KDE 4.2 plasma crashes, so I don't know whether they are trying to find info on this particular problem, or whether they are having a more serious crash problem than I am. (BTW, the OpenSUSE packages update at least once a day, so developers are still working seriously on 4.2 and have not gone on sabbatical or anything like that.)

In case any Kmail developers happen across this post, I will note one tiny issue -- when I select a folder, the folder list is scrolled down just a bit, making it hard to read the email at the top of the list, which is the one I am reading one. Really minor, but so much nicer when the whole thing scrolls to the exact top where it belongs without manual intervention.

That's all I know for today.

Thx.