Plasma Desktop seems to die

[erget]

Hello everyone,

This is my first experience with actually writing onto a Linux forum, so please bear with me and my banal questions I recently made the final jump over to Linux and am using OpenSUSE 11.2 KDE 4 on my laptop while waiting for my companies to get new computers, which will probably be running Ubuntu.

So I've got OpenSUSE set up and running great, but twice in a row I've had strange crashes: Once last night and once today. It seems like my plasma desktop dies. This is what happens:

- Desktop 1 (my main working desktop) suddenly has a different background and I have no options to work with the plasma desktop stuff I usually have on it (I've got the Marble satellite picture of the world). Instead, all the icons look a lot more old-fashioned, like a friend of mine's GNOME desktop (not meant as a dig against GNOME, just an observation).
- The other desktops have a pure black background.
- My task bar and everything on it's gone - no clock, no programs, no kicker menu
- Alt+F1 doesn't do anything any more
- Ctrl+Alt+Delete doesn't do anything, to shut down I have to use the terminal

Things that do work:
- Alt+F2 to call up programs
- Switching between desktops with keyboard shortcuts (my pager's gone)
- Zooming out to see my desktops with Ctrl+F8

I've managed to identify the following factors that might contribute to the crash:
- Something similar happened when I shut down my computer while connected to an external monitor, but my desktop background wasn't gone and the plasma desktop functions were there, I just didn't want to bother putting together a new taskbar. The problem there (and this occurs consistently) was that, if I move my task bar to the external monitor and don't move it back before disconnecting from the monitor, SUSE leaves it there until I come back to the monitor again. THEN I can move my taskbar back. Workaround: I always leave my taskbar on my desktop screen. Maybe room for improvement in the next version? Like I said, though, this problem isn't entirely like the one I've got here.
- Both times I was making a system backup and saving it to an external hard drive. That seems to use a lot of system resources and that's when everything went wrong.
- This time I was working with OpenOffice Writer and suddenly my desktop, etc. was gone after viewing a second presentation in Impress. I was able to close down Impress, but Writer died when I tried to close and save. I still can't get the window closed, but it won't update either. I tried using Ctrl+Esc and that let me kill the process, but a couple minutes after that Ctrl+Esc stopped working too.

This time, the crash occured after calling up a presentation in Impress. Last time it was after connecting an external hard drive. Any thoughts on the issue?

Best wishes and thanks a bunch!
Daniel

[gogalthorp]

Check which version of KDE 4.3.x you have' I had such problem at first but there was an upgrade to 4.3.5. This upgrade should have happened if you are running the updater applet.

You can check by going to Yast-Software Management and checking the version numbers. Upgrade if you have not already upgraded.

If you already have 4.3.5 You may have a miss configured plasma file.

Logout of KDE
Press alt-ctrl-F1 log in as yourself. Then
rm /home/usernamehere/.kde4/share/config/plasma*
then type
exit

press alt-ctrl-F7
log back in
you will need to reset your desktop but it should now have correct configuration files.


Last is to wait a month and install 11.3 which uses KDE4.4

[erget]

Thanks for the quick reply. Not wanting to delete my desktop configuration (on the thought of it, though, I could have just made a backup copy), I connected my laptop back to the monitor I'd been using at work and dragged over the task bar. That's how simple it was! But it is a bit strange that the monitor autodetect doesn't automatically put the task bar back onto the main monitor, when no other's connected.

Oh well, maybe in 11.3...