said Michele Calgaro:
| On 12/28/2014 08:15 AM, 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.
|
|
| sorry for the late reply. The desktop behavior is controlled by the
| kdesktop process. When your desktop stops updating, from CLI type:
| ps aux | grep desktop
| and see if there is something like:
| username      8414  0.4  0.7 260192 28956 pts/8    Sl   12:50   0:00
| kdesktop

avahi     1973  0.0  0.0  32308  1732 ?        S     2014   0:01 
avahi-daemon: running [dep-desktop.local]
dep       3200  0.0  0.1 252184 17972 ?        Sl    2014   
1:04 /opt/trinity/bin/kdesktop
dep      11289  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        Z     2014   0:02 
[kdesktop_lock] <defunct>
dep      29758  0.0  0.0   9388   904 pts/0    S+   16:12   0:00 grep 
desktop

nevertheless, it hasn't updated since 10:19:53 AM 26 December. and a rmb 
click on the desktop does not produce the expected menu.

| If not, kdesktop has crashed. You can type:
| kdesktop & from CLI to restart it (or alternatively Alt-F2 and then
| kdesktop).

dep@dep-desktop:~$ kdesktop is already running!

| If this brings everything back in order, please let us know because we
| need some more advanced testing to understand why and where kdesktop
| crashed.

fwiw, top reports 3 zombies.
-- 
dep

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