muesli's Blog - KDE

The X.org, NVidia & KWin Situation

nospam@example.com (muesli) — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 10:08:45 -0400

For months and months now, my Linux Desktop is suffering from one particular issue, which makes it a pain to use on a daily basis: After having it running for a few hours, suddenly X.org and KWin go bonkers and start eating up all my cpu horse-power.

It's not uncommon to see X.org spiking up to a whopping 60% CPU usage, followed by KWin using roughly another 25%.

Since I'm suffering from this issue now ever since I switched to KDE 4, I thought it's time to turn to you fellow KDE developers for some good advice, since all my undertakings to resolve the issue have failed:

I have tried to switch to a different / newer graphics card, experimented with various versions of the NVidia driver and tweaked X.org settings, have turned off various desktop effect plugins, switched between XRender and OpenGL, even re-installed Kubuntu on a new machine.

No dice, though... after it's been running for a few hours my desktop is completely unusable. Every mouse or keyboard action becomes sluggish, scrolling through lists takes ages and logging out from my KDE session up to two minutes (which is the only known way to resolve the situation, giving me another six hours or so, before I'll have to repeat that routine).

From talking on IRC, forums and a bit of googling I know that I'm not the only one who's having this problem. So I'm curious if anyone has experienced the issue and gained some insight as to what's actually going on. I'd be happy to know.

Update on July, 13th:
Still investigating and collecting data to figure out what's going on. Since I wrote this blog entry originally, my system suffered from terrible slowdowns twice more. In both cases X.org and KWin instantly stopped utilizing my CPU when I closed all GTK-based apps. (e.g. Firefox, Chromium, Pan, Gimp, ...)

At least this is some progress, even though I still don't know what might possibly be causing this. Running a pure Gnome installation, I've never experienced those issues.

Thanks,
Chris

Happy New Year

nospam@example.com (muesli) — Sun, 31 Dec 2006 14:17:52 -0500

Just wanted to wish everyone a Happy New Year. Keep on hacking and thank you all for your contributions to KDE this year. 2007 ought to be great

Now go and party till dawn!

PhotoBooth for KDE?

nospam@example.com (muesli) — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 01:00:54 -0400

Quick check: Someone working on an "Apple PhotoBooth"-like KDE application? Does something similar even exist already?

In case I missed something, drop me a note please!

Cheers,
muesli

Just for the log...

nospam@example.com (muesli) — Wed, 31 May 2006 01:07:22 -0400

...the first piece of opensource, I've ever written. Back at the age of 15, pretty much exactly 10 years ago. Funnily back then nobody really seemed to care or know what opensource is. Neither did anyone really realize the power behind. Except a few developers, of course. Nice to see how things have changed in retrospect. Let's just imagine what could be done in another decade. I'm looking forward to it.

Thanks to google for caching it. I wouldn't have a backup otherwise, I reckon.
COMUnit at Google Groups.

amaroK on MacOS X

nospam@example.com (muesli) — Fri, 13 May 2005 02:22:11 -0400

Kudos to the Fink Project!

I installed most of KDE and a fresh svn-version of amaroK on my iBook today. Worked pretty much without a problem. I just needed taglib and the gstreamer packages from fink's experimental repository (thanks RangerRick) and a small patch for amaroK.

Hooray!
...muesli

A Famous Quote

nospam@example.com (muesli) — Wed, 16 Feb 2005 04:44:15 -0500

"If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today...A future start-up with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose."

Now guess who said that originally?

Linus Torvalds? Wrong.
Richard Stallman? Wrong.
Muesli? No-ho.

Bill Gates? Just kidding. Oh no, wait. He did. He really did.
Maybe he was developing an opensource OS named Billux back then? Just guessing, though.

...muesli

amaroK Desktop Script

nospam@example.com (muesli) — Thu, 03 Feb 2005 01:13:10 -0500

Just stumbled over the amaroK Desktop Script on kde-apps.org. Nicely done, cool script

If you're curious: since I didn't have the pyqt/pykde stuff installed on my Debian desktop yet, I had to run "su -c apt-get install pyqt-tools python-kde3 python2.3-kde3" to get this stuff installed. Easy job.

So, now there's always a cool blended coverart of the currently playing album on my desktop. Sweet

...muesli

Storage Media Applet

nospam@example.com (muesli) — Fri, 31 Dec 2004 01:12:00 -0500

Recently I installed new CVS checkouts of kdelibs and -base on my system and played with the "new" Kicker. Kudos to Aaron for all the changes, fixes and new features.

Now, I just added the Storage Media Applet to my Kicker and noticed a few things:

1. It rocks I got used to mount / unmount / eject my CDs, iPod and Cam with it. Two clicks instead of a few keystrokes in Konsole. And it even shows the current mount-status, hooray!

2. Ejecting audio discs doesn't seem to work. It tells you, that the current disc couldn't be mounted - which is correct, but shouldn't matter at all

3. After I mounted a disc I clicked "Open in New Window", which opens a Konqui-window pointed to "media:/hdc". That's fine so far. I got into trouble once I tried opening a big mpeg-movie with xine: KIO started copying the file to my kdecache prior opening it, which took ages. It would be better if KIO detects, that the disc already is mounted and opens xine with the real url (the mounted location) of the file.

Nuf' ranting. CVS head feels stable and great atm

Now start drinking your favourite kind of alcohol, the new year's coming
...muesli

New KDE Toys

nospam@example.com (muesli) — Wed, 29 Dec 2004 09:42:19 -0500

Here's some stuff I just installed recently and I'm rather happy with:

1. My new mouse cursors:
Pinux Theme.

2. kio-locate:
A KIO accessing the locate database.

3. Active Heart style:
This and Lipstik are my favorite styles currently.

Have fun,
muesli