KDE 3.3: menubar/kicker always dies

labrador · Guru Joined: 04 Oct 2003 Posts: 316

First of all:
Why in the hell must I run unstable ati-drivers to run the current stable Xorg?

This is FUBAR, and the whole treatment of ati-drivers within Gentoo
has been repeatedly FUBAR for 3 months at least. Amongst the
3D game card users, roughly half will be using ATI (the other half nVidia).
So I don't understand how Xorg requiring an unstable ati-drivers can even
get through QA. What should be done, do you wonder? QA should hold back
the version of Xorg that requires unstable ati-drivers.

Is there a QA group within Gentoo? What do they test? Is there
a test plan or is it "worked for me, good luck!" ?

The problem in my desktop Gentoo system is that there is a segfault
from KDE kicker shortly after KDE launches. The result
is that my taskbar disappears and then I can't launch many applications.

There are no errors in Xorg.0.log
There are no errors in dmesg or /var/log/messages related to KDE or X applications

I'm running an ATI 8500 if that might be related (doubtful).

Versions you might want to know (nothing unusual):

labrador · Guru Joined: 04 Oct 2003 Posts: 316

I wasn't really paying attention to what was killing kicker at first because I
was testing various applications for sound working. It is actually
kmplayer that causes a segfault in kicker when launched.

It still think it is insane that we must use unstable ati drivers with
the latest stable xorg and 2.6 kernel. I don't intend to run anything
in unstable, but gentoo forces me to do so to emerge the current
level of stable. This is bad QA. If something is going to drag
forward a dependancy from unstable branch, then that package
should itself remain in unstable until the dependancies can all clear
as stable.

labrador · Guru Joined: 04 Oct 2003 Posts: 316

First of all, to ensure this isn't messed up with all of the 3.4
issues on the forums...
THIS IS NOT A KDE 3.4 KICKER PROBLEM

Kde 3.3 is unstable for me

Anything could kill kicker - starting an xterm for example.

I've switched back to KDE 3.2 in my session preference and it
is stable. KDE isn't very useful without a taskbar.

Lancelight · n00b Joined: 04 Apr 2005 Posts: 2

The ATI drivers are trash. They should never have been released in the 1st place. ATI may be able to make video cards, but they sure as hell cannot write drivers if it slapped them upside the head. The proprietary drivers are RIDDLED with bugs. I have had nightmares galore using the ATI drivers and the main reason I am even using Gentoo is because of this fact. Gentoo is probably the only distribution that prefers the DRI Project drivers over the ATI drivers because they are open source. Now, I have an ATI 8500 All-In-Wonder myself and I am VERY pleased with the DRI drivers for it. I can rezise the screen on the fly (ATI drivers wont allow you to do that), I can use 2 colors if I wanted to all the way up to the Max 32M (The ATI drivers only have 16M-32M. They dont even allow 256 color or any other color format for that matter), NWN plays beautifully (The ati drivers have had a known crash bug in them for over TWO years).

My advice, scrap the trash that ATI spews out and install the DRI Project drivers. There is a FAQ here on gentoo somwhere that tells you how to install the DRI drivers for the 8500 or any other radeon card for that matter.

Oh yea one other thing. The "All in Wonder" portion of the 8500 is useless with the ATI drivers. At least with DRI you can install the Gatos project drivers and use your TV out ports. I use this to watch DirectTV on my 21" monitor since I dont have an HDTV, or a TV at all for that matter.

Oh yea, here is the link that I used to get my card up:

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/dri-howto.xml?style=printable

labrador · Guru Joined: 04 Oct 2003 Posts: 316

I switched that desktop system to Ubuntu after waiting to see a solution
for sometime. For some reason the KDE Kicker bug is way more common
on sparc, but I saw it on x86.

Lancelight · n00b Joined: 04 Apr 2005 Posts: 2

After a week or 2 I also had the same kicker problems. I upgraded to 3.4 instead of downgrading to 3.2 and kicker hasnt crashed since. But for me it wasnt loading something that killed kicker. I would go to bed, get up the next day and there would be no task bar.