I noticed a very frustrating behavior regarding icons in the task manager in my OpenSuse 12.1.
I have a pretty old PC (Pentium D/3 GHz and 1GB of RAM) and from time to time my icons from the task manager just dissapear (icons I place there with the option “Add to panel” from right-click at the icon in App Launcher). I’, not saying the icon just vanishes, they are still there, but just won’t be visible – I mean the place where they were is still occupied, when I hover the mouse over them, I still got that tooltip from them, I can still click on them and launch the program, or right-click on them and get the context-menu – they are working, but just not appear in the taskmanager !!!
And the only work-around is to just logoff and login again !!!
You can imagine how frustrating this is !!
Is there any way I can revive those icons when this is happening ?
If I just delete such an icon from taskmanager, and then re-place it there (from App Launcher via that option “add to panel”) it still has the problem (not visible, but working good otherwise) !!!
I have the same version (Opensuse 12.1) installed on another PC, with more RAM (2GB) and a little better processor, and this thing is not happening, so I guess is something related to scarce memory resources, but … WHAT ?
Any suggestions as what can I do to avoid this ? (or at least, make them appear again, without logoff/re-login, or rebooting my PC)
Okay … things are, unfortunately, even worse (much worse).
The same thing happen with applets that are started and stays there, in the down-right corner of the screen, like the clippboard icon, or the volume (kmixer) icon !!! (actually, right at this moment, my kmixer icon is not visible – though I can right-click on it and open the kmixer window from the contextual menu …
It’s soooooooo frustrating !
Even worse … similar thing happen within Dolphin, with those arrow buttons (back, up, forward) !!! Only workaround is to close Dolphin and re-open it after that.
Even in Firefox, things happen the same (as in Dolphin, with the back/forward icons at Firefox’s toolbar).
That’s something I cannot understand … I’d say it’s KDE’s fault, but since it only happen on this particular PC (which I admit, lacks some RAM – nonetheless, I don’t think KDE should behave this way even in such low-memory conditions – and after all there is still 1024 MB of RAM, not less) does anybody have similar behavior, or even better, have some clue about what can be done about it ?
On 01/31/2012 08:56 AM, corneld wrote:
> Any suggestions as what can I do to avoid this ?
you don’t say if it has been like this from first install or not, but
i guess it is a video driver problem…
if it has always been like that then i guess maybe there is a better
driver that can be installed by carefully working your way though: http://tinyurl.com/37v9y7m
if it suddenly and noticeably started happening after an update,
application install, or etc then it might be more involved…
and, another thing you try (to avoid log off/log in) would be to turn
off desktop effects (and don’t use compiz)
>
> Okay … things are, unfortunately, even worse (much worse).
>
> The same thing happen with applets that are started and stays there, in
> the down-right corner of the screen, like the clippboard icon, or the
> volume (kmixer) icon !!! (actually, right at this moment, my kmixer icon
> is not visible – though I can right-click on it and open the kmixer
> window from the contextual menu …
> It’s soooooooo frustrating !
>
>
> Even worse … similar thing happen within Dolphin, with those arrow
> buttons (back, up, forward) !!! Only workaround is to close Dolphin and
> re-open it after that.
> Even in Firefox, things happen the same (as in Dolphin, with the
> back/forward icons at Firefox’s toolbar).
>
> That’s something I cannot understand … I’d say it’s KDE’s fault, but
> since it only happen on this particular PC (which I admit, lacks some
> RAM – nonetheless, I don’t think KDE should behave this way even in
> such low-memory conditions – and after all there is still 1024 MB of
> RAM, not less) does anybody have similar behavior, or even better, have
> some clue about what can be done about it ?
>
Oh, yes, unfortunately, this happened here from the beginning … it isn’t (or I don’t find any relation) related to a certain update.
Well … it could be due to the display driver, yes – I only have an embedded Intel video card, so … I wouldn’t be too surprised to be due to this (though … it didn’t had all these strange behaviors with older Opensuse versions – this PC managed to work with all elder versions way back to 11.1 I think …). The actual video driver in use is the default driver installed (video controller is an Intel 82495 as I see in /var/log/messages )
glxinfo reports this: <<OpenGL renderer string: Mesa DRI Intel(R) 945G x86/MMX/SSE2>>
Ahh… yess … the first mentioned bug hit me too.
I, too, experience that behavior (sometimes (impossible to say when, or after how time, or in what other conditions) I close some window, but it’s title still remains present on the taskbar, as if it would still be active (of course, clicking on it doesn’t do anything); in order to get rid of this remnant app from the taskbar, I have to start another program (usually start that program again – say Thunderbird).