I just installed OpenSUSE 11.3 last night and so far today I have had TWO Plasma crashes which leave the taskbar in a black color with stripes.
After the first one I located a post on the Web that said to do the following:
logout
Do CTRL-ALT-F1 (this does not work on my system at all, why?)
login
rm ~/.kde4/share/config/plasma*
CTRL-D to logout
CTRL-ALT-F7
Login
I did that and it did not fix the problem. I messed around with the desktop settings and somehow got the task bar back to gray.
Now during a copy of a large number of files from one disk to another with Dolphin, it crashed AGAIN.
So far 11.3 is proving a massive disappointment compared to the 11.0 I had on up to last night. Things are more complicated and clearly not as stable as KDE 3.5.x.
And I’m switching back to Konqueror as the default file manage because Dolphin appears to be unstable at doing a simple task like copying files without freezing.
I also hate the task notifier which during a copy pops up and covers my NoScript bar in Firefox.
Anyone have any solutions for this mess, or do I have to switch to another distro? I really don’t want to do that, but so far OpenSUSE 11.3 is a massive problem.
My graphics card is an ASUS NVidia GeForce 9800GT with 512MB of VRAM. However, yesterday when these crashes occurred, I hadn’t installed the latest NVidia drivers. I did that yesterday evening and today the system seems more stable. At least I’ve had no further Plasma crashes today, knock on wood.
Yet another problem has surfaced. I am moving a lot of files - gigabytes worth - from one partition to another to rearrange my file layout. Twice now, once in Dolphin and once in Konqueror, the file copying has simply stopped in the middle with no error message or anything. It just stops. Not to mention that file copying has been excruciatingly slow compared to openSUSE 11.0. This last time I was copying about 65GB of documents and that copy had been going on since when I went to sleep around 6AM this morning all the way up to now at 11PM this evening. That is simply ridiculous. I was able to backup that directory to an external USB drive under 11.0 MUCH quicker than 17 hours!
The machine is an AMD M3N78 motherboard quad-core with 4GB of RAM, so it’s not a performance slog.
And finally I made the mistake of installing Firefox 3.6.12 from the openSUSE repository rather than Mozilla. It turns out that a right-click “save page as” does not work in that version of Firefox! When I first experienced this, I did a Google and found a lot of other people have that problem as well. I can get by with using CTRL-S (which does work), but I may have to uninstall Firefox and get the vanilla Mozilla version (which is also up to 3.6.13.)
I also have the perception that 11.3 is seriously slower than 11.0 in terms of desktop responsiveness. At first I did not have the desktop special effects turned on. When I turned it on, the task bar turned transparent, thus fixing the aftereffects of the plasma crash. But I’ve turned the effects off again because I think they were contributing to the slowness of the system.
All in all, this has not been a good experience so far. I’d downgrade back to 11.0 but that is no longer supported, so that isn’t an option.
And I didn’t use the multimedia quide. Should I change the Packman repo above, it appears to be the German one. I do have the VLC one, why does it need to be removed? The guide doesn’t say.
OK, I did that. Now what did I do? Switch the repo TO Packman or FROM Packman? Because it shows cancel switching, so does that mean I no longer get versions from Packman?