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