[SWLUG] kdeinit going nuts

[Telsa Gwynne]

On Thu, Dec 05, 2002 at 11:19:52AM +0000 or thereabouts, Foeh Mannay wrote:
> I don't know if anyone has seent this before or knows of a solution, but 
> it's really starting to wind me up now as it's happening more and more 
> frequently...
> 
> Every now and then (or seemingly every few hours lately) I notice that 
> my screensaver is going really slowly. That's usually the first sign.
> 
> It's always kdeinit, and it's always hogging 90%+ of the CPU! Killing 
> X seems to fix it, though yesterday I killed X and it stayed there, 
> even before I logged in. If I kill it while I'm in K it doesn't like 
> it much and restarts X.

I presume kdeinit is the process that spawns all the rest of KDE
for you. I can see that killing it will kill off all of KDE for
you, yes... 

> Another one that has plagued me since I ran up2date (never again!) 
> is that if I open images with konqueror, or quite often opening a 
> directory and letting it thumbnail files, it seems to restart X. 
> I can't seem to find any reasoning for it happening, and it seems 
> to happen more when I've got MP3s playing?
> 
> Any advice would be greatly appreciated. I'm on RedHat 7.3, Athlon XP2100+ 
> 512MB RAM and with a Geforce 2 MX200 graphics card (with nvidia drivers).

Okay. Here's a guess. I think it's X-related rather than KDE-related.

I think you are using a graphical display manager to login, rather
than logging in at a text console and then typing "startx"? 

The reason I think that is that "X restarting" sounds like X is
actually crashing; and that something is saying "Ooh, no X, better
start it up again". And the something is likely to be xdm/gdm/kdm.

X should not crash. I'm sorry to tell you, though, that if those
nvidia drivers are the binary-only ones you get from the nvidia
site, I don't know any X hackers who will spend much time on 
helping you. They don't have access to the source code of those
drivers. You will need to find out whether the drivers are
associated with the X crash. Updating them to a later version
might work. Removing them and powering down, switching it _off_
and then switching it back on should remove any trace of their
involvement. If the problem still occurs, then you know it's
not the drivers, and you can point the finger squarely at X.

If you must use the nvidia drivers, there are nvidia people
on some of the XFree86.org mailing lists who seem to respond
to bug reports involving them.

> <rant>
> PS "Use GNOME" is not an answer. I've had so many righteous 
> GNOME users say that to me in the past even when it was working 
> properly. I can't stand GNOME. And I don't use KDE because it's 
> like Windows before anyone asks. I hate using Windows and I use 
> KDE because it's got everything I need and everything the way I 
> like it.
> </rant>

I haven't mentioned GNOME at all. I hope you're impressed! The
thing is, though, if your X server is buggy somehow, the only
way GNOME would help is if it asks X to do different things,
which are not the things triggering the crash. If it asks X to
do the same thing, you'll get the same crash. So it would be
a workaround rather than a solution.

Do you absolutely _need_ the binary drivers? I would be inclined
just to stop them being loaded and see whether either of these
two problems just go away as a result.

xscreensaver certainly used to be a great source of X server
crashes because some of the funkier screensavers asked X to do
stuff most other programs don't. (I'm sorry for the generalising
here, but I actually don't understand it on any deeper level:
this is how it was explained to me!) There's a bunch of OpenGL
ones which gave me the impression of being particularly associated
with that.

Telsa