I have a situation where my graphics driver occasionally messes up (usually when I drag a chrome window), and I need to re-start KDE somewhat gracefully from the Ctl-Alt-F1 terminal. I cannot see what is going on on the screen anymore, so using the GUI is out of the question. I would prefer to not have to reboot every time this happens.
Fixing the issue on why the graphics driver screw up is a separate issue - what I am looking for here is a work-around until I can fix the other. This is also useful when something like nepomuk misbehaves and has a memory leak - running out of memory also cripples a KDE session beyond recovery.
I currently use kdm stop followed by kdm start, but have to Ctl-Alt-Backspace to get things going again. Applications also don’t get shut down gracefully (I suspect).
I guess there really is two questions here:
- Is there a more graceful way to restart KDE from the terminal? ($DISPLAY is not set, so qdbus does not work)
- Is there a way to re-load or re-initialize the graphics driver without re-starting KDE?
Some background information: I use opensuse 13.1 with an ATI Radeon HD 5700 graphics card. I use the ATI proprietary driver (13.25) so I can get 3D acceleration.
Any ideas and/or suggestions?
Thanks!
Update:
I can reliably reproduce the error by dragging a chrome window.