Mine the Harvest

So you have downloaded that spiffy new plasmoid for KDE4 and installed it. Then all manner of interesting things begin to occur. Perhaps the new plasmoid itself simply does not function correctly, or perhaps the next time you login the plasma desktop fails to start. Or, in my most recent case, configuring the plasmoid caused a seg fault which then crashed the entire plasma desktop. Ahh, such pleasant surprises. I’ve never really taken on learning the first thing about plasmoids really – it’s been on the list, but pretty low. However, this most recent situation of a crashing desktop on login inspired me to at least dip my toe.

While there is certainly much more to know, and while I am not a developer, I thought it might be helpful to point out a few things that may help others with crashing plasmoids. I’ll add to this as I learn more, but this should at least point you in the right direction. I was suprised that googeling for debugging plasmoids returned rather dismal results, and no guide appears readily available, so if you have landed here, good luck and please add your own hints.

Okay – so first off, some basics. If your KDE desktop has crashed, don’t panic. You can actually restart it easily enough. First, try alt tabbing to see if your windows are sill running despite the inhospitable and otherwise completely black screen. Start Konsole using Krunner (alt-f2) and once at the command line simple restart the process:

paracelsus@Callandor:~> plasma-desktop

That should re-initiate your desktop.  (If your X server was killed as well, then the issue is not as likely with the plasmoid, and you may have other things going on. If X dies and dumps you to the shell you can usually restart it by running startx  If X is still running, but you can’t start Krunner and Konsole, simply go out to a virtual terminal (ctrl-alt-f1) and restart plasma-desktop )

Of course, if you have a buggy plasmoid that is crashing, it may very well just crash again. If you just installed the faulty plasmoid and know which one it is you can remove it with:

paracelsus@Callandor:~>plasmapkg -r buggyPlasmoid

(If you don’t know the exact name, try plasmapkg –list)

One other very fine tool is plasmoidviewer. Using this you can run a buggy plasmoid in a more contained environment. This makes it a bit easier to capture output and if it crashes, it likely will not take down the plasma desktop process.

paracelsus@Callandor:~>plasmoidviewer buggyPlasmoid

Now, if that does not work, and your desktop is still crashing, you can try a more drastic fix which is to simple move your KDE user profile. Do so with:

paracelsus@Callandor:~>mv ~/.kde ~./kde-broken

Then, restart X (crtl-alt-backspace) and log in again. This will create a new, default profile. You can then continue troubleshooting the old one, etc.

Also, if you have encountered a buggy plasmoid, please take the time to submit your findings to the author, perhaps at kde-look.org or wherever else you obtained the plasmoid from. Supply the output obtained by running the plasmoid with plasmoidviewer as well as your distro version, kernel, and KDE version as a minimum.

Good luck and if you have any other basic plama / plasmoid trouble shooting tips, please feel free to add them.