I'm the guy from a Japanese company evaluating KDE from a desktop OS replacement. We had a trouble with a user changing his KDE theme from BlueCurve to Crystal, to move back to BlueCurve five minutes later (all operations having been executed through the KDE config panel).
This user could not launch any KDE applications (Konqueror, Quanta, KDEvelop, Kontact or whatever begin with a K...)
The "base" KDE was still running fine
And all the non KDE applications were still running fine (Gedit, XPDF, the Gimp or Nautilus)
We tried to upgrade KDE to the latest version 3.3.? for our OS (Fedora Core 2), it did not solved the problem.
The symptoms were like a memory leak. Whenever a KDE application was launched, it started, eating up all memory, then eating the swap and finally blocking the computer.
Thanks to your community : We so called "solved" the "problem": Removing the user, creating a new one, and suppressing the possibility of a theme change.
(so called resolving in a quick way, no time to do subtle, since we are in evaluation of Linux, time to resolve a problem is directly considered as a flaw of the OS by PHBs, and they are right to think this way, I do the same)
I would like to thanks the two guys who have helped, indicating the "memory leak" nature of the problem, and indication the "poisonnous" nature of the BlueCurve theme. Even if I use linux for more than five years now (mostly server side) it was the first time to ask to the community something. I appreciate your help.
More rewarding, this "blocking problem" could have been fatal to my pilot project of switching from Microsoft to Linux on the desktop. All the microsoft zealots (aka Microserfs and various PHBs) have claimed Linux unstable and unfit for the company as a consequence of this trouble, providing demonstration of the flaw to all their collegues, to try to prevent the pilot project to suceed. They are not important, the important people to convince are the passive, those who don't really care (i.e. 90% of the employees). These people have been positively pleased that we could get almost instant access to front line help at no cost. This does not means that we won't pay in the future for a support package from some company, but that indeed mean that we wont spoil our costly hours of support on trivial problem (aka a theme change...). Thanks one more time to your community to help me spin it in the favor of Linux.
On the minus side I don't understand how a Theme change can break that badly KDE applications (memory leak from a Theme ??? how can this even happen ???, a theme are images and fonts no ???). I do not have time to investigate, and have choosen to deflect the blame on RedHat, rather than KDE. It is for me easier to replace a distro (Mandrake or Suse will fit the bill) rather than replace all KDE apps selected for the "default desktop" with alternatives (if they exist !). But question : since all the changes have been done through the KDE admin panel, why the software did not check the theme (BlueCurve) detect its "poisonnous" nature, and prevent the change ???
Well, thanks one more time, as a whole. I know I speak to much, but you know I'm french, I can't help.
Guillaume CABUZEL Da Vinci Co. Ltd. ___________________________________________________ . Account management: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde. Archives: http://lists.kde.org/. More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.
