[Nottingham] KDE Startup problem

[Ebrahim Makda]

see below....

David Aldred wrote:

>Problem with a friend's linux machine...  it's  Dell, running Mandrake 10.1 
>and KDE 3.3 I think - for the reasons below I can't check very much with her 
>by phone)!
>  
>

>She's done something to it, no idea what - thinks the last thing she did was 
>change a sound in System Notifications.  Now, on KDE startup:
>
>- Everything runs extremely slowly (switching to a console and doing top 
>reveals a kedinit process taking 99%+ or processor time: killing that gets 
>things going faster).
>
>- Whether or not the kdeinit process has been killed, when KDE finally does 
>appear to have started fully (menu bar appeared), there are lots (she says 
>about 30) windows on the screen, each titled 'notification', and containing 
>the Information logo, the word 'activate', and an OK button: clicking the 
>'OK' button appears to do nothing.
>
>I wondered if she had accidentally told the sound system to use a non-existent 
>sound player or something, forcing a loop of a failure message trying to play 
>a sound and thus another failure message until everythin locks up.  However, 
>it could really be anything!
>
>  
>
not a solution.. .but my experience....
I have found on my mdk 10.1 system that I always have to *kill artsd* 
before xmms(sound program) works.
I also have got problems when booting up the computer ( it pauses for 
about 3 mins, during which time the only application I seem to be able 
to open is emacs - everything else including konsole or the other vitual 
terminal e.g. ctrl+alt+2 seem to be hung, when the 3 minutes are up 
everything I have clicked on in the meantime loads up)
My system worked ok (in terms of sound) on 10.0, 9.2, 8.2
I put in a cron job which ran every minute under root outputting the 
process list (ps -eF) to a file but it runs once before the approx 3 
minute hang and then continues running once a minute after the 3 minute 
hang and so I was unable to see what is going on.
I have given up on trying to sort this out - I am just waiting for the 
next release of Mandrake and hope that works ok...

**

>Strikes me I could do with a KDE startup log file or similar, but I don't know 
>where there is one -  /var/log on my machine, with much the same 
>configuration, doesn't seem to contain kde.log or anything else helpfully 
>named!). 
>
>The machine in question is going to be here later this evening in the hope 
>that I can sort something out:  anyone got any helpful thoughts?
>
>TIA......
>
>  
>