Stopping Kubuntu Crashing

While KPhotoAlbum and LaTeX were busy installing themselves, I got on with doing other bits of fiddling. Things were going quite nicely.

Then I was playing with display settings and it crashed again. I rebooted. Had hardly started anything going again when it crashed again.

That's five times.

There's nothing that stands out to me in the syslog, kern.log, daemon.log, Xorg.0.log, or ~/.xsession-errors. This is ... mystifying. Frustrating. Infuriating, even.

Of course, Matthew is more alert than I and spotted the quantities of "ERROR" and "ILLEGAL" things in the kern.log that I totally missed. And the fact that the proprietary NVIDIA drivers did not, in fact, install.

Reinstalling them. Rebooting as required.

This time, the proprietary drivers are definitely installed and appear to be working. So I'm going to bed, to play more with settings in the morning.

Continuing to Configure

Alors, a certain victoriousness has arisen.

That is to say, the NVIDIA drivers appear to have stuck. Of course, this instantly meant everything was too tiny to see, but someone else's Googling - all praise IRC - located the option in System Settings to force fonts to a 120DPI rather than the default 90, which has improved matters for those things I've re-started since.

Problems currently present:

1. Sound. There isn't any. Oddly, there was some yesterday; at least, I could play an audio file in Amarok, and there was a login alert thing. Now, none of these are happening. I've been reminded that among the things I did last night - that, dammit, I didn't write down; I fail at remembering to write down all of what I've done, in spite of my determination to - I created an /etc/asound.conf file which was meant to make xchat make noises. It hasn't done so, so I'm about to log out and in again having removed said file, to see if that fixes that.


2. XChat isn't making noises;


3. XChat isn't opening links in browsers


4. I need to restore all of the old files, including remembering how to put Images and Music on the secondary hard drive and give them aliases from ~/ .


5. Firefox wants lots more configuration wrt tabs and so on.


6. I need to finish installing software, most particularly LaTeX and KPhotoAlbum which I think got messed up by one of the crashes.

Doubtless many other things are wrong also. This is just to remind me what I've thought of at this point.

Configuration: Yet More

The sound problem has been solved by removing /etc/asound.conf. I still have no notificationy beeps coming from XChat, but this is not a surprise.

I'm now installing updates - quite why so many things need updating, or claim to, given that I installed from the internet using a totally recent net-boot installer, I do not know. But I shall assume there's a good reason and hope it doesn't break anything.

I'm also installing Aptitude; I don't like KPackageKit at all. I don't have a clear idea of how to make sure Kubuntu knows it should be using Aptitude. This will take some research, I fear.

A very very minor niggle I want to turn off: lots of my non-maximised windows are, and should be, in the upper right. When I open them they're in the top left. This was true under Debian too and I'm acclimatised to moving them - though I suppose in theory it would be interesting to find out how to default open windows in the upper right. But more importantly - when I move them, the blasted things seem to think this is me telling them to maximise. This is irritating. Somewhere there must be a setting ... I must find it.

Another small irritation is that what's in the system tray is thoroughly silly - and I can't seem to edit them. Or at least, what I think ought to work doesn't. This needs correcting.

Indeed, I'd quite like to be able to move things around on the task bar - I could do this in Debian by click-and-dragging, and surely it should therefore be possible here? Must be a setting somewhere. Must try to find it.

Oh, lord. While faffing around with the systray thing - if systray is the right word for it - I shifted things around and the taskbar bits ended up hidden and then the whole flaming thing crashed. Oops. And hasn't recovered, either; I suspect I need to restart stuff. Tried restarting the desktop - plasma-desktop - via the instructions given at this random website, to no avail. So I killed it using top and then did kstart plasma-desktop. And it was still thoroughly unhappy. So I deleted ~/.kde/share/config/plasma* and then killed using top and restarted using kstart again. This obviously undid what I'd done about pinning launch icons to the panel and also re-imaged my desktop, but those are easily fixed. Now I have to play about without making the same mistake.

KGS. Java. Oh, I hope this works more smoothly than last time! A problem for another day.

Apparently installing Aptitude was a mistake. KPackageKit now won't do anything - it just sits there forever claiming to be searching but finding no packages. Aptitude, on the other hand, loads (albeit with many warnings at the console) and then searches happily for packages, for all the world as though it's working. Lets me mark them for installation. Then ... doesn't do anything (not even giving warnings on the console) when the "apply changes" button is clicked. Happy joy.

Using aptitude-curses may, or may not, be successfully installing LaTeX. It certainly appears to be successfully downloading the relevant packages. But I am going to emphatically claim that something has gone wrong and that I don't think it was me doing something stupid - if installing a second package-manager is going to make the first package-manager crash, how the hell is one supposed to change package-manager? I suppose in theory I should have googled first to see if it would break anything ...

While I wait for aptitude-curses to finish, I will also note that xchat appears to be trying to be far too clever with opening links - it's opening some things in Firefox as I want it to, but a link someone posted that had a .gif extension, it opened in an image viewer of some sort. This isn't an xchat session, I don't think; I think it must be plasma-desktop or, I don't know, some X thingy? At any rate, perplexing!

Aptitude-curses having successfully downloaded the LaTeX packages, it won't install them, because something is locking /var/lib/dpkg . Botheration. I can't find what's locking it - nothing obvious in ps -A. Judicious use of lsof identifies a rogue thing that needs root to kill it, so I kill it. Then it installs them. Hurrah.

Using aptitude-curses again, I installed synaptic.

This I had trouble running it - and I think I may have discovered what the aptitude problem was at the same time - because it isn't running as root. Synaptic had the courtesy to tell me that's why it wasn't doing anything, though. So. This was resolved once I discovered I had to use kdesudo instead of sudo. No idea why, but it worked, so I'm not knocking it.

Well. That's been an exciting day (or number of hours, anyway) faffing around, and the machine is getting on for feeling like home. Huzzah!