Suse 11.4 KDE settings fault, KDE app launch fault, why?

English Open Chat
1

I have been a long term Open Suse user. A little under 8 years.
I have auto update turned one.
It seems that Novel does not issue any updates to fix bug, just security fixes.
Case in point. Kmail, 11.3 - Kmail did not include the message context in a reply.
With 6 months of updates, throught Yast, this was never resolved. Lots of updates came in, but nothing to fix kmail. Why not?

Fast forward to 11.4 - Installed on a test machine. It booted.
Installed on development machine. First week, better than 11.3. KDE had a lot of bug fixes. Dual screen still needed to be set each time I changed users. This required uses the personal setting app. Then after a few days, the personal setting app would not launch, then kmail would not launch, etc…

Create a new user, things launched a few times, then they failed too.

Tried to copy the new users .config, .kde, .kde4 directories to my account, no go.

Found that a name-less KDE developer fixed the bug, in 4.6.3.
Found a “binary package” for Suse 11.4 with a one click install.
Hit the button. Many 10’s of conflicts in Yast, hit the resolve radio for the first choice, in each conflict, hit try again. When’t through this process at least 10 times, then I gave up. It seems that the Suse team has made a number of “enhancements” to KDE, so many that KDE is not patchable.

So, now I had a brand new 11.4 system that would not launch any KDE 4.x related programs.

So what is the story here? It seems that the open Suse project is really a giant Beta-Test for some thing that Novel can sell. Is this the case? Do the enterprise versions work any better than the open versions? What happened to the Suse quality distributions of the past?

Jeffrey
:frowning:

2

welcome new forum poster who has used openSUSE for eight years and has
never asked here for help to solve any problem, including today…

On 06/05/2011 01:36 PM, jeffrey newman wrote:
>
> It seems that Novel does not issue any updates to fix bug, just
> security fixes.

Novell doesn’t do bug fixes for Kmail, the Kmail folks do…if they
don’t, then the bug fixes can’t be passed along…

> Case in point. Kmail, 11.3 - Kmail did not include the message context
> in a reply.
> With 6 months of updates, throught Yast, this was never resolved. Lots
> of updates came in, but nothing to fix kmail. Why not?

has a bug been logged against that problem?

does anyone else have that problem with Kmail, or is it just you? or is
it just all openSUSE users (then, it is an openSUSE, and not a Kmail
problem)?

> Fast forward to 11.4 - Installed on a test machine. It booted.
> Installed on development machine. First week, better than 11.3. KDE had
> a lot of bug fixes. Dual screen still needed to be set each time I
> changed users. This required uses the personal setting app. Then after a
> few days, the personal setting app would not launch, then kmail would
> not launch, etc…
>
> Create a new user, things launched a few times, then they failed too.

so, why are the config files in your home directory getting scrambled?

mine are not! thousands of other users are not…

so, what might you be doing that i don’t? or what is it about your hard
drive/system which is scrambling the bits, but that is not happening on
mine, or thousands and thousands of others?

> Tried to copy the new users .config, .kde, .kde4 directories to my
> account, no go.

the better way to do that is to move the data from the old to the new…
well, actually: the best way is to find out how the /home is getting
corrupted…

>
> Found that a name-less KDE developer fixed the bug, in 4.6.3.
> Found a “binary package” for Suse 11.4 with a one click install.
> Hit the button. Many 10’s of conflicts in Yast, hit the resolve radio
> for the first choice, in each conflict, hit try again. When’t through
> this process at least 10 times, then I gave up. It seems that the Suse
> team has made a number of “enhancements” to KDE, so many that KDE is not
> patchable.

NO! the current version of KDE for openSUSE is 4.6.0, like i’m running…

if you elect to move away from the software in the oss, non-oss, update
and packman repos you get what you get…me, i prefer stable, reliable
and non-corrupted openSUSE 11.4, if you go for the bleeding edge you are
gonna bleed…

>
> So, now I had a brand new 11.4 system that would not launch any KDE 4.x
> related programs.

self inflicted.

> So what is the story here? It seems that the open Suse project is
> really a giant Beta-Test for some thing that Novel can sell.

i agree with that…which is why i never participate in that
test…instead i never upgrade to the latest version in the first couple
of months after release, and i never get adventurous and install from a
repo other than the basic four (oss, non-oss, update and packman) as you
did when you installed KDE 4.6.3…

> Is this the
> case? Do the enterprise versions work any better than the open versions?
> What happened to the Suse quality distributions of the past?

those went away when Novell took over, but Novell is sold now and we
shall see if better stability returns…until then be VERY careful to
not rush into experimental software (factory, playground, etc) and i
also steer away from all opportunities to ‘upgrade’ between releases of
openSUSE…i mean, it is only eight months between release…

–
dd CAVEAT: http://is.gd/bpoMD
via NNTP openSUSE 11.4 [2.6.37.6-0.5] + KDE 4.6.0 + Thunderbird 3.1.10
Acer Aspire One D255, 1.66 GHz Atom, 1 GB RAM, Intel Pineview graphics

  • When your gecko is broken you have a reptile dysfunction! *
3

First of all, thanks for consciences reply.

A few point of clarification.

Regarding the kmail problem on 11.3
It is a known and fixed bug in KDE. I found this on the net. The fix never made it into the suse updates.

The launch problem in 11.04 is a known and fixed bug in KDE.
It is a miracle, that you have not encountered it. I’m happy for you.
Once again, it is a fixed issue in KDE, that never made it into the Suse updates.

I have not made any upgrade other than what Suse 11.4 released.
I tried to install and updated binary package from KDE that was allegedly made for Suse 11.4
that was when I discovered that it would not install. The conflict errors in the update.

So, I’m back to my original point, that the kmail, and launch bugs that have been found and fixed in KDE did
not make it into the Suse update system.

Of course I have been trying to figure out why something is getting trashed in my configuration files.
I’ve looked in messages. I made copies of the original directories that I was guessing contained the trashed
parts. No go. Then I found the reference to a fix by the KDE group.

So, now I’m back to fully updated (from Suse) 11.3
Kmail is non-functional now. So, I’ve switch to Evolution.

Things are working.

You mentioned that Novel was sold, and there is hope of Suse again.
I hope you are correct. Over all I really like it.
The key issue is the enhancements that Novel makes to the base packages
make updating problem code very difficult. This would be fine, if Suse offered timely updates.

take care,

Jeffrey

4

On 06/06/2011 04:06 PM, jeffrey newman wrote:
>
> Regarding the kmail problem on 11.3
> It is a known and fixed bug in KDE. I found this on the net. The fix
> never made it into the suse updates.

i’m familiar with the bug nor its resolution:

when was the bug fixed by the Kmail folks AND made available to the
Linux community?

and, is there a bug filed in the openSUSE Bugzilla
<http://tinyurl.com/nzhq7j>, if not i would propose that it was not
pushed to the update repo because as far as the devs could tell, no one
using openSUSE had that problem…so, considering the limited number of
hands to do the work, i’d guess they found plenty of other stuff to do…

of course, 11.3 is still in use, so i’d guess of there were a bug
reported (along with the other 1149 other active 11.3 bugs) it might get
pushed out…now, if there was only one person having that problem, you
might imagine they would push out something standing in the way of (say)
a hundred, or thousand…

> The launch problem in 11.04 is a known and fixed bug in KDE.
> It is a miracle, that you have not encountered it. I’m happy for you.
> Once again, it is a fixed issue in KDE, that never made it into the
> Suse updates.

as noted, i’m not familiar with that problem, either on my own machine
or having seen folks come here to ask how to fix it…can you give me a
cite in bugzilla, or just a thread or two in which it is asked about
here somewhere…

you say it is a problem in launching “personal setting app”…sorry, but
i don’t recall any instances of it not being able to launch–but, you
are welcome to prove me very wrong (with cites of others with this problem)

> I have not made any upgrade other than what Suse 11.4 released.
> I tried to install and updated binary package from KDE that was
> allegedly made for Suse 11.4
> that was when I discovered that it would not install. The conflict
> errors in the update.

so, you are saying that you were offered a KDE4 fix from the openSUSE
update repo, but it would not because of errors?

what were those errors, and point me to the thread where you asked for
help in resolving the problem…

> So, I’m back to my original point, that the kmail, and launch bugs that
> have been found and fixed in KDE did
> not make it into the Suse update system.

they must have been, because i don’t have either of those problems on my
11.4, and unless you show me other wise, neither has anyone else.

> Of course I have been trying to figure out why something is getting
> trashed in my configuration files.
> I’ve looked in messages. I made copies of the original directories that
> I was guessing contained the trashed
> parts. No go. Then I found the reference to a fix by the KDE group.
>
> So, now I’m back to fully updated (from Suse) 11.3
> Kmail is non-functional now. So, I’ve switch to Evolution.

i’ve never used Kmail, and only used evolution about one minute, phew!

> Things are working.

good to hear, happy for you…

drop in more often, and let us try to help you with these problems as
they come up…

> This would be fine, if Suse offered timely updates.

as mentioned, there are a limited number of hands available to do all
the work which needs to be done…and anyway, to my way of thinking if a
suitable alternative is available then there is no problem which can’t
be fixed…that is to say that during the entire life of 11.3 and now
11.4 i’ve had almost no problems with Thunderbird…and, i have a friend
who still uses (Al)pine for all his mail needs…

–
dd CAVEAT: http://is.gd/bpoMD
via NNTP openSUSE 11.4 [2.6.37.6-0.5] + KDE 4.6.0 + Thunderbird 3.1.10
Acer Aspire One D255, 1.66 GHz Atom, 1 GB RAM, Intel Pineview graphics

  • When your gecko is broken you have a reptile dysfunction! *
5

If it was fixed in 4.6.3, then that was a tad too late for the opensuse 11.4 release. However, you can upgrade KDE to 4.6.3 if you want to. A number of people have done that, and there are forum posts on how.

Personally, I’ll stay with 4.6.0 until the next opensuse release. I’m not having serious problems, so I’ll go by “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

6

I think I have resolved the problem in 11.4.
The launch problem was self inflicted.
I modified the /etc/bash.bashrc file to put the new Qt library in the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment.
I did this so the app I was working would launch with the correct library.
I have installed 11.4 on a different machine, so I can maintain a development environment and still work.
Things seem to be working well now. This is going on the third day.
I have resolved the different version of Qt based apps with a per-app launch script.

I also found a KDE update repository, and added this to my updates for 11.3 and 11.4.
I expected the 11.3 kmail forward problem to be resolved in 11.3. This was not the case.
But, now kmail works fine in 11.4 so this is a mute point.

And, so far, I would say that11.4 is superior to 11.3. More bugs are fixed.
If any thing weird shows up I post again.

thanks again for all the help and comments.

Jeffrey