I like KDE4. OK, so it has had bumps; yes 4.{0.1.2} were 'pre-release', but how else can you get feedback and bug reports. I can live with that. I did. But now I have a problem and lock-up, but I'm not convinced its the fault of KDE4, though perhaps KDE4 has uncovered it. This weekend I fixed up a few erroneous repository URLs (thanks Patrick) and finally got updates to Xorg. In fact I got a number of set of updates to Xorg over the period Friday though Sunday. Perhaps that was significant. My problem though that - and still - is that if I run KDE4 it freezes. It locks up. I can SSH to the machine and see that xorg is eating 100% of one of the CPUs - the thread seems to be locked-in. The load factor steadily grows. Oddly the RSS for xorg is small, only about 8% of 2G. I've established this is specific to KDE. I can run icewm and E16 and E17 all day with no problem. I've also wolf-fenced down things with KDE. It seems running Firefox triggers the lock-up. Not a URL, but running firefox. Even the "firefox crashed ..." startup dialogue will freeze the machine once I switch to it. So, how do I know the fault is in Xorg and KDE/F is merely triggering it? I can run in failsafe mode and that awful xorg.conf.install and it doesn't lock up. But the display & fonts are lousy and it doesn't recognise my USB mouse, only the touchpad. If I zap the xorg.conf altogether I get a similar result; it doesn't lock up but things like the right-click don't work properly since there is nothing in the xorg.conf to tell it about mouse. Or for that matter the graphics card's capabilities. And when I look at the /var/log/Xorg.0.log I see that in the absence of an xorg.conf it somehow load up many video drivers instead of the single one that was in the old xorg.conf. I now see [ 1378.656] (II) LoadModule: "fglrx" [ 1378.659] (II) LoadModule: "radeonhd" [ 1378.746] (II) LoadModule: "ati" [ 1378.748] (II) LoadModule: "radeon" [ 1378.749] (II) LoadModule: "fbdev" [ 1378.760] (II) LoadModule: "vesa" [ 1378.805] (II) LoadModule: "fbdevhw" [ 1378.859] (II) LoadModule: "vgahw" [ 1378.890] (II) LoadModule: "fb" [ 1378.893] (II) LoadModule: "ramdac" [ 1378.893] (II) LoadModule: "exa" What gives? Is it just probing? Probably: [ 1378.659] (II) UnloadModule: "fglrx" [ 1378.894] (II) UnloadModule: "radeonhd" [ 1378.894] (II) UnloadModule: "fbdev" [ 1378.894] (II) UnloadModule: "fbdevhw" [ 1378.894] (II) UnloadModule: "vesa" but that still means ati AND radeon AND vgahw AND fb were loaded. I don't understand this. Are they all necessary where only radeon was needed before? I'd really like to reconstruct an xorg.conf that bring back the capability of my USB mouse and the Radeon card. But my attempts so far have all ended in the hang. Actually this mail was interrupted by a hang. I tried alt-tab to another window and the panel came up and things froze. So perhaps the problem with the interaction between KDE4.4 and Xorg goes deeper than it appears. Someone is going to ask why I don't report this as a bug on bugzilla. Well, while I can reproduce it I can't say a lot about the what or why. Certainly not enough to pinpoint the fault to being in KDE as opposed to KDE just triggering a fault in Xorg. And while it seems to be FF that is related, it might just be the interaction with Gnome aspects of FF. Perhaps we need a FF based on Qt :-) But that doesn't explain the problem with compositing ... Or perhaps it does since icewm doesn't do that ... If you have any ideas about how I could isolate the cause of the problem, please let me know. -- Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth, more than ruin, more even than death. . . . Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man. -- Bertrand Russell -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org