Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (946 mails)

[Roger Oberholtzer <roger@xxxxxx>]

On Wed, 2010-10-13 at 16:40 +0100, Dave Howorth wrote:
> Roger Oberholtzer wrote:
> > Too bad my theory on why I have a slew of different machines that render
> > badly for non-root users of KDE, yet render correctly for root remains.
> > I am at a loss. And have a slew of upset users. William Stephenson was
> > helping me with suggestions. But no solution has been found.
>
> At one place I worked, we had a teddy bear that did the debugging for
> us. When you had a difficult bug, you sat the teddy where he could see
> both you and the screen and then explained to him exactly what was
> happening and why all the hypothetical explanations failed. He usually
> solved the problems quite quickly, just by staring at you intensely at
> the right moment.
>
> You could try explaining it all to us in excruciating detail if you like ...

Having exhausted all other routes to a solution, I can consider this...

I have an earlier thread on this list, and the opensuse-kde list (August
2010).

Here is what I first reported:

For regular KDE users, many screen components are not drawn. They are
black. This includes the panel, KDE menus (like the kickstart menu or
the knofity message window.) The result is often black text on a black
background - which is impossible to read. The desktop folder shows icons
and a title. But there is no window decoration at all. It is like some
facet of rendering is not working. It makes no difference if I have
rendering on or off. It happens on most system installs we do. The
computers are different. Some are nvidia, others ATI. They are not
installed by the same person or from the same media.

Here is the strange part: it looks ok for root. So I can only conclude
that the correct software is installed.

So, the first thought was that some files needed are not accessible by
the average user. Will Stephenson has spent a bit of time looking in to
this, suggesting possible places where permissions could be a problem.
We have found nothing. I used 'find' to try and locate things in the
various kde directories that cannot be read by a non-root user. There
were no violations. It seems that the users can at least read all system
files - which is all they should be able to do.

This has happened on 11.2 systems:

 * as on the original DVD
 * after upgrading (newer KDE)
 * with KDE 4.5.2

This is not a cosmetic issue. Some parts of the system are virtually
unusable as a result. We have reinstalled, and tried other variations on
the install, like:

 * install
 * update
 * user logs in for first time

 or

 * install
 * user logs in
 * update

or

 * no updates

etc...

We have deleted the user's .kde4 and .config directories, as well as
temp files in /tmp and /var. It makes no difference.

I do not have the luxury of trying 11.3 on these systems. But as the
problem happens with three versions of KDE4 (including 4.5.2), I am not
sure what that would show.

The last release known to work on these systems is 10.3. But we do not
want to make any new systems with this release. 11.2 is the one we have
tested the most in all other facets related to our use.

I have a few screen dumps to show what I mean. I can send them along to
anyone interested so they can see what I am trying to describe. A couple
of users want to run off with their systems, and are a bit disappointed
that the GUI is such a problem.

Given the frequency and nature of our problem, it is absolutely
surprising that we are the only ones to experience this problem so many
times.



-- 
Roger Oberholtzer

OPQ Systems / Ramböll RST

Ramböll Sverige AB
Krukmakargatan 21
P.O. Box 17009
SE-104 62 Stockholm, Sweden

Office: Int +46 10-615 60 20
Mobile: Int +46 70-815 1696

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