Rapid blinking of HD LED when logged in at KDE

gerard27

Hello all,
I am not sure where to put this since I am not sure that it is a desktop issue.
I have two users in KDE.
USER1 and USER2.
When I login as USER1 the HD LED starts blinking rapidly even when idling.
With USER2 this doesn't happen.
Here are the .xsession-errors files:
USER1

!equilibrium · Posted: Tue Apr 11, 2006 4:00 pm Post subject:

maybe on USER1 the .kde* configuration files are broken.
you can try to remove it: "rm -rf ~/.kde*" and see if it fix the problem
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gerard27 · Posted: Tue Apr 11, 2006 5:04 pm Post subject:

Thanks,I'll try that and let you know.

gerard27 · Posted: Tue Apr 11, 2006 5:18 pm Post subject:

On second thought I think I'll try other things first.
Removing ~/.kde will remove all my configs.

!equilibrium · Posted: Tue Apr 11, 2006 5:27 pm Post subject:

gerard27 · Posted: Tue Apr 11, 2006 5:40 pm Post subject:

Well after backing up the config files I deleted ~/.kde and rebooted.
Still blinking.
There must be some more kde files somewhere because my desktop
still has all the program icons it had before.I have no idea where to look for that.
G

Napalm Llama · Guru Joined: 04 Jun 2005 Posts: 533 Location: Cardiff, UK

I had a similar problem to this when I switched from Gnome to KDE. famd was constantly accessing the hard drive, and eating my CPU while it was at it. I unmerged famd and emergeed gamin, and the problem was sorted. Check if you have famd running - and if you do, check what resources it's using, and what happens when you stop it.
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gerard27 · Posted: Wed Apr 12, 2006 3:03 pm Post subject:

Hi Napalm,
No famd running.
I killed dbus

Napalm Llama · Guru Joined: 04 Jun 2005 Posts: 533 Location: Cardiff, UK

It must be some user-specific config thing... or possibly to do with group membership differences between the two users?

I honestly don't know anything about dbus, so I can't really help you out there

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gerard27 · Posted: Thu Apr 13, 2006 9:45 am Post subject:

Hello again,
Both users belong to the same group.
I found out that when you kill dbus hald also is killed.
When dbus and hald are both running the blinking is
slower and then the blinking happens to both users.
When I started this thread hald was not running,apparently
I forgot to add it with rc-update to the default runlevel.
Wether the disk is really active as indicated by the LED I don't know.
There is no audible noise.
G

gerard27 · Posted: Tue Apr 18, 2006 2:09 pm Post subject:

Hi,
I did a new install using Gentoo minimal 2006.0 cd on a spare partition.
The hd-led is still blinking.
I checked the original install to make sure all the necessary stuff was in
/etc/runlevels.
Now both installs act the same:About every 2 seconds the hd-led blinks.
I wonder,is this normal? Is something scanning the hardware continuously?
Any help would be welcome.
Thanks.
G

yeye_olive · n00b Joined: 21 Apr 2006 Posts: 17

I had this blinking LED issue on my account too. It stopped when I disabled the automatic startup of the KDED Media Manager service. You can configure it in KDE's Control Center: simply uncheck the corresponding checkbox in KDE Components > Service Manager > Startup Services.

Since the configuration is done on a per-user basis, this might be the cause of your problem. Also, this service is started automatically by default, so deleting ~/.kde does not help.

Note that thanks to this trick the service won't be automatically started when you open a session, but it will be started as soon as you visit "media:/" with Konqueror or a KDE file open/save dialog box. At that point the LED will blink until the end of the session unless you stop the service manually in the Control Center. I did not find a simple way to disable the service permanently (but I do not use "media:/" anyway).

I hope this helps.

gerard27 · Posted: Fri Apr 21, 2006 9:45 pm Post subject:

Thanks yeye_olive,
I tried that but it made no difference.
When I switch on my box and the login window is reached
the blinking is already there.
But I unchecked the media thing anyway but alas no dice.
G

ghost_recon · n00b Joined: 09 Aug 2003 Posts: 28

Im having this problem also, it seems it starts blinking as soon as hadware-abstraction-layer service is started during bootup. /etc/init.d/hald stop seems to be a temp fix to the problem. Still looking for a better solution.

!equilibrium · Posted: Wed May 10, 2006 10:53 am Post subject:

maybe can be a gamin problem, read this: http://farragut.flameeyes.is-a-geek.org/articles/2006/05/06/gamin-sigh
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gerard27 · Posted: Wed May 10, 2006 11:22 am Post subject:

Hi equilibrium,
I have no knowledge of gamin.
I checked and it was indeed installed,probably some kind of dependency.
When I run top it's not there and I can't find it in /etc/init.d/.
I will investigate further.
Thanks,
G

!equilibrium · Posted: Wed May 10, 2006 11:33 am Post subject:

gerard27 · Posted: Wed May 10, 2006 11:53 am Post subject:

I unchecked gam_server in kde> components > service manager,
restarted kde and gam_server was running.Killing it doesn't help!
It comes right back on.
The hdd led is still blinking,this is really driving me nuts!
Thanks anyway.
G

!equilibrium · Posted: Wed May 10, 2006 11:56 am Post subject:

gerard27 · Posted: Wed May 10, 2006 12:09 pm Post subject:

I did what Flameeyes suggested,no dice.
Also like I wrote earlier,it starts before KDE is started.
G