On Sunday 28 December 2014, dep wrote:
sorry to be such a bother, but as long as i'm bringing things up, here's one that has been an issue for a couple of years and survived into R14.
my desktop crashes, but in such a way as to not even be noticeable at first.
i have in lieu of wallpaper xplanet set up as a realtime moon phase indicator, updating hourly. the way i tell the desktop has crashed is that it doesn't update -- in this case it last refreshed at 10:30 a.m. yesterday. i believe that i was probably editing pictures at that time, though would not swear to it.
after it crashes, a right click on the desktop does not produce the expected menu. as it happens, kicker and everything else continues to function as expected -- in fact, it was just now that i noticed that the desktop itself had gone south.
i thought i'd look in the x error log, bit i see that the one i have, ~/.xsession-errors, is of an unspecified file type and won't open in a text editor (it reports its size as 500.0 k).
any idea if there's a log that might let me see what's going on here and if so what log it might be? bonus points, how i might restart the desktop without logging out and back in? extra bonus points, how i might fix it so it doesn't do this anymore? i'm running some flavor of ubuntu 12.04LTS -- i say some flavor because when i sought to upgrade a few days ago the ubuntu upgrader refused, citing third-party apps or a beta version of the opsys, or something; it didn't specify. i thought i had bog standard 12.04LTS on the machine but am apparently wrong.
you might find hints following this thread:
http://trinity-users.pearsoncomputing.net/?0::6738
if the problem is the same. Here are some quotes: On Friday 10 October 2014, Gerhard Zintel wrote:
On Tuesday 07 October 2014, Slávek Banko wrote:
On Tuesday 07 of October 2014 11:34:25 Ilya Dogolazky wrote:
Hi !
I'm running trinity desktop on Debian Testing linux. Sometimes all the icons from desktop disappear and (at the same time!) the desktop lock button (blue lock symbol in the kicker panel) stops to work.
What service/program to I have to restart in order to fix it without logging out and in again?
Cheers
Ilya Dogolazky
Disappearing icons from the desktop shows to crash KDesktop. Starting kdesktop should correct the problem.
At this situation please take a look into ~/.xsession-error, if there is listed a backtrace about KDesktop crash? It could help to detect and fix the problem.
Update: Today I faced the problem again. Unfortunately I did not look into the .xsession-errors file before I started to relaunch kdesktop. Nevertheless it did not crash. First action: I started kdesktop from Konsole. It told me that kdesktop is already running but didn't come back to the prompt. Icons were not recreated. I had to Ctrl-C for the promt. "ps ax" showed me an old version of kdesktop and a second new one with <defunct> message. Killing the defunct one was not possible. I killed the original kdesktop program (Desktop went black) and relaunched it and - voila - the icons reapeared on the desktop. Also the defunct process of kdesktop was gone.
I do not find anything special in the xsession errors file. I try to investigate more accurate next time.
Hope this helps Gerhard