Kicker dying, system not shutting down

[neddie]

Weirdness afoot once again, maybe someone can help shed some light?

The other day I had my Mandriva 2005LE on for quite a bit longer than usual (long download, 'nother story) - and twice noticed that the task bar had died. No problem, seen that before, bit annoying but I know the fix now - Alt-F2, kicker, back comes the start bar. Then (and this may or may not be entirely unrelated) when I did eventually want to shut it down, I did as normal, closed all the applications, go to the menu, choose Logout and Turn off Computer. It exits my KDE session, but returns to the login selection. Odd. I choose "Halt", it asks "Really halt?", I say "yes", and it does nothing. I go back, try the Halt option again, say yes again, still nothing. I go back, log in, choose shutdown again, takes me back to the login selection again. Odd. So eventually I logged in, opened a console, typed "halt" and it shutdown cleanly, with no obvious errors.

 

This isn't the first time kicker has died, and not the first time it's refused to shut down, but both are rare and I'm wondering if they're connected? Or maybe someone can shed some light on perhaps why it's doing this?

 

Or it could be this is a known 2005 problem and I should just upgrade to 2006 already, come on get with the times, that kind of thing?

[Steve Scrimpshire]

For kicker dying, check /home/neddie/.xsession-errors and/or /var/log/Xorg.0.log

 

For the system not properly shutting down, it may be related or it may be an acpi issue. Make sure you have acpi and acpid installed and go to mcc -> boot -> Set up how the system boots. Select 'Enable acpi' and then 'Next'. Highlight the kernel you normally boot to and click 'Modify' and make sure that acpi=on is in your append line. Click 'Ok'. Click 'Finish' You may have to play around with noapic and nolapic, too, but I think acpi will fix it.

This won't be solved until after a complete reboot.

Edited August 6, 2006 by Steve Scrimpshire

[daniewicz]

Or it could be this is a known 2005 problem

 

I have run Mandriva 2005 with KDE since it was first introduced. I have never seen this kicker problem on my system.

[ianw1974]

I've had it very rarely that when choosing shutdown it went back to the login screen and didn't do anything. What login manager are you using? I'm assuming kdm, just as I was.

 

The only way I managed to do it was through a console (CTRL-ALT-F1) and then login and type "halt".

 

Unfortunately, it happened so rare, that I never bothered to get it fixed. What might be worthwhile doing is to rename your .kde folder to say .kdeold and then start with a blank, new kde config and see if the problem occurs again. If it does, then you can at least rule out some sort of corrupt config.

[neddie]

Thanks guys.

There's nothing in Xorg.0.log, but my .xsession-errors contains the following:

X Error: RenderBadPicture (invalid Picture parameter) 141

Major opcode: 137

Minor opcode: 23

Resource id: 0x10000000

X Error: RenderBadPicture (invalid Picture parameter) 141

Major opcode: 137

Minor opcode: 6

Resource id: 0x10000000

X Error: RenderBadPicture (invalid Picture parameter) 141

Major opcode: 137

Minor opcode: 5

Resource id: 0x10000000

X Error: BadDrawable (invalid Pixmap or Window parameter) 9

Major opcode: 73

Minor opcode: 0

Resource id: 0x10000000

In file kernel/qpixmap_x11.cpp, line 630: Out of memory

kicker: crashHandler called

KCrash: Application 'kicker' crashing...

- maybe there's a memory leak somewhere swallowing up my RAM (I've got 768MB total). The error message that comes up (it happened again last night when I left it on all night) says:

The application KDE Panel (kicker) crashed and caused the signal 11 (SIGSEGV).

and the backtrace just says:

[KCrash handler]

#7 0xb71d598d in QPixmap::convertToImage()

from /usr/lib/qt3/lib/libqt-mt.so.3

I had a thought maybe it's a problem with my screensaver, as this is more likely to come on when I leave the system on for longer periods, I'll try changing or disabling that and see what happens.

 

About the shutdown, I already have ACPI on so haven't tried switching it off. As I say, it behaves normally about 99.7% of the time, so it's very hard to diagnose - maybe I should just put up with it as Ian says! :D By the way, yes it says my login manager is MdkKDM (Mandrakelinux Display Manager).

[neddie]

Another clue which may help with the shutdown thing - last night my battery ran down without me realising, and when it got below a certain power level it made the KDE exit sound, closed everything and returned to the login screen. Because I didn't have my power adapter with me, I just tried to shut it down from the login screen, and again it did nothing after the "Really Halt?" question. I tried Ian's suggestion of logging into a Ctrl-Alt-F1 screen and doing a 'halt' from there, but that just seized up when it got to "System shutting down", stopped responding, and I had to do a hard power off :(

 

It's possible (I can't quite remember) that on the other times that it's done the "Really Halt?" thing, I had previously also run the battery down so far that it's logged me out, and then I've plugged in the power and logged back in. Maybe this breaks something which prevents it from shutting down later?

 

It could also be that when the power runs out, it's actually trying to shut down, but something is stopping it and it's going back to the login.

 

Btw, it wasn't the screensaver causing the kicker dying - I reset it to "blank screen" and kicker still died overnight. But it doesn't look like the kicker dying and the shutdown thing are related.