Minimize, Maximize and close buttons gone

[chippermon]

Hello all,

All of a sudden I do not have minimize, maximize or a close button in the upper right of my application window. Has this happened to anyone? What can I do to fix this? They were there previously. I have been mucking about in System Settings but have been unable to repair it. I have searched the boards looking for a similar issue, found a few related things but nothing to help me. I am MGA 5 with KDE using default desktop settings. I'm not sure what other information is required. For the time being I am managing by using the Current Application Control Widget in the bottom task bar. Which actually brings me to another issue. I used to be able to open up many different File windows and navigate between them by mousing over the icon on the lower bar, then a list of open windows would pop up and allow me to choose which one to bring up.

Thanks

[doktor5000]

Seems you lost your window manager/decorator. Should be fixable via opening a terminal and running

Code: Select all

kwin --replace

as your normal user. Does that help?

[chippermon]

Wow! Perfect. That did it. Just as an aside. I opened up tty f2 and tried the command as user and as root with out success. Then suddenly I realized, of course, it has to be done in DE where the problem lies so I opened the terminal there and voilà.

Is there a link to information on how to customize my desktop? I see, in the documentation wiki, screen shots of desktops and they do not look like mine. For instance, they show home folders and a trash folder, etc. I have never had that available after installation. I try to muck around with the plasma thingys but find it a little cumbersome and often mess up whatever I have on the tool bar now.

Thanks for the help

[doktor5000]

For the customization, what particular screenshots did you look at and what do you want your desktop to look alike?
KDE has a vast selection of workspace themes, and wallpapers and such that can easily be chosen.

Although quite a lot is available upstream at https://userbase.kde.org/Welcome_to_KDE_UserBase
Some basics are also shown in our wiki at https://wiki.mageia.org/en/First_step_with_KDE

[jiml8]

I will comment that, with Mageia 5, I have stopped using compiz (at least for now) and have started using kwin.

Kwin seems to crash a lot. I had said nothing, figuring it to be some peculiarity of my own system, but upon seeing this thread, I guess I should pipe up and say OP is not the only one who loses his window manager.

OTOH, compiz has some memory leaks, which is why I decided to try kwin again. Kwin does not seem to have the leaks.

[doktor5000]

Would be interesting to know what causes the crashes. I've never had kwin crash AFAIR

[jiml8]

Kwin went for quite awhile without crashing, but it just did crash, and here is what seems to be relevant from .xsession-errors.

Code: Select all

QTimeLine::setPaused: Not running
Qt has caught an exception thrown from an event handler. Throwing
exceptions from an event handler is not supported in Qt. You must
reimplement QApplication::notify() and catch all exceptions there.

terminate called after throwing an instance of 'std::bad_alloc'
  what():  std::bad_alloc
Application::crashHandler() called with signal 6; recent crashes: 1
KCrash: Application 'kwin' crashing...
KCrash: Attempting to start /usr/lib64/kde4/libexec/drkonqi from kdeinit
KCrash: Connect sock_file=/home/jiml//.kde4/socket-dadsbox.homegroup/kdeinit4__0
QCoreApplication::sendPostedEvents: Cannot send posted events for objects in another thread
QCoreApplication::sendPostedEvents: Cannot send posted events for objects in another thread
QCoreApplication::sendPostedEvents: Cannot send posted events for objects in another thread
QCoreApplication::sendPostedEvents: Cannot send posted events for objects in another thread
OpenGL vendor string:                   NVIDIA Corporation
OpenGL renderer string:                 GeForce GT 740/PCIe/SSE2
OpenGL version string:                  3.1.0 NVIDIA 346.35
OpenGL shading language version string: 1.40 NVIDIA via Cg compiler
Driver:                                 NVIDIA
Driver version:                         346.35
GPU class:                              Unknown
OpenGL version:                         3.1
GLSL version:                           1.40
X server version:                       1.16.4
Linux kernel version:                   3.19.8
Direct rendering:                       yes
Requires strict binding:                no
GLSL shaders:                           yes
Texture NPOT support:                   yes
Virtual Machine:                        no
X Error: BadWindow (invalid Window parameter) 3
  Major opcode: 20 (X_GetProperty)
  Resource id:  0xc00012
X Error: BadWindow (invalid Window parameter) 3
  Major opcode: 20 (X_GetProperty)
  Resource id:  0xc00012
X Error: BadWindow (invalid Window parameter) 3
  Major opcode: 20 (X_GetProperty)
  Resource id:  0xc00012
X Error: BadWindow (invalid Window parameter) 3
  Major opcode: 20 (X_GetProperty)
  Resource id:  0xc00012
X Error: BadWindow (invalid Window parameter) 3
  Major opcode: 20 (X_GetProperty)
  Resource id:  0xc00012
X Error: BadWindow (invalid Window parameter) 3
  Major opcode: 20 (X_GetProperty)
  Resource id:  0xc00012
X Error: BadWindow (invalid Window parameter) 3
  Major opcode: 20 (X_GetProperty)
  Resource id:  0xc00012
X Error: BadWindow (invalid Window parameter) 3
  Major opcode: 20 (X_GetProperty)
  Resource id:  0xc00012
X Error: BadWindow (invalid Window parameter) 3
  Major opcode: 20 (X_GetProperty)
  Resource id:  0xc00012
X Error: BadWindow (invalid Window parameter) 3
  Major opcode: 20 (X_GetProperty)
  Resource id:  0xc00012
X Error: BadWindow (invalid Window parameter) 3
  Major opcode: 20 (X_GetProperty)
  Resource id:  0xc00012
X Error: BadWindow (invalid Window parameter) 3
  Major opcode: 20 (X_GetProperty)
  Resource id:  0xc00012
QTimeLine::setPaused: Not running
kwin(32292) KWin::GlxBackend::present:

FWIW, kwin restarted automatically, which has not always been the case.

[doktor5000]

Would probably be helpful if you report that upstream, either first in KDE forums or directly as a bugreport.
Might be necessary to increase debug logging via kdebugdialog at least for all kwin stuff.

But seems to me not a kwin issue but some misbehaving Qt application.

[jiml8]

No, it's probably in kwin. To run QT, you invoke a master routine that watches for any control inputs, then invokes appropriate callbacks (event handlers) based upon the detected input. Given that kwin is built around QT, it has to do this.

I would expect that somewhere there is a try-catch construct in an event handler, and the catch path is being invoked, which apparently is a no-no. The error message is actually quite informative, and tells what has to be done to fix the problem.

But, yes. It's upstream from Mageia.

[chippermon]

So I still seem to be having problems with Kwin. Every now and then the window buttons (min, max,close) disappear but after running the kwin command it returns and, usually, after a couple of restarts everything is back but very often now the bottom widget panel on desktop 1 completely disappears. This happens after I click on one of the program buttons in the widget panel. I switch to desktop 2 and the panel is there (same on 3 and 4) but with a totally black background on the rest of the screen but now I am able to run some programs.

Also, I try to arrange my virtual desktops in two rows instead of one to create more space on the panel for running programs. I do this using the settings program. but every time I restart one row of desktop buttons reappears and of course now the bottom panel is missing on Desktop 1 as I begin to use it. I switch to desktop 2 in order to open this browser and when it opens it switches me to desktop 1, running my chosen program(ie. Firefox) and appears there without the default panel.

So to recap, kwin still not stable and desktop settings not able to be saved and default panel (bottom of screen) disappears on Desktop 1 when used.

Not sure what to do about this. It is frustrating trying to get things up and running every time I want to do something on my computer. Any ideas?

Thanks

[jiml8]

I continue to have kwin crashes, but it restarts automatically. I don't know what function restarts it; I would not expect this to be systemd though it might be. Probably a watchdog someplace in KDE.

As for the taskbar on the bottom of the desktop, I don't know what to say about losing it on one desktop only. Suggests there is a problem with a config file, but those are not well documented and finding it will be fun. I can tell you, though, that it is located someplace in the ~/.kde4 directory.

You might try executing the command "plasma-desktop" when you have this problem. If that doesn't work, perhaps "plasma-desktop --replace" would work. I am not certain that the option --replace exists for plasma-desktop, but plasma-desktop is the name of the program that provides the taskbar. You also might try "killall plasma-desktop" and see what happens. Your desktop background will go black, and all widgets/tools/taskbars/gadgets will vanish. The system SHOULD restart it after this, but if it doesn't, executing the command "plasma-desktop" will restart it.

To deal with the apparent config problem, in the worst case you can remove the directory ~/.kde4. I would rename it as ~/.kde4hold, then log out and log back in. This will cause KDE to rebuild that directory, giving you the default KDE appearance. You then can re-customize, and hopefully wind up with a configuration that does not have a defect in it.

Should you decide to roll back, you can simply delete the ~/.kde4 directory, then rename .kde4hold to .kde4, then log out and back in, and you will be back to where you were.

[doktor5000]

You might try executing the command "plasma-desktop" when you have this problem. If that doesn't work, perhaps "plasma-desktop --replace" would work. I am not certain that the option --replace exists for plasma-desktop, but plasma-desktop is the name of the program that provides the taskbar. You also might try "killall plasma-desktop" and see what happens. Your desktop background will go black, and all widgets/tools/taskbars/gadgets will vanish. The system SHOULD restart it after this, but if it doesn't, executing the command "plasma-desktop" will restart it.

FWIW, plasma-desktop doesn't support --replace. And the cleaner way to quit it is using "kquitapp plasma-desktop" which can also be used for other KDE stuff.
And if only a tasbar is missing on one screen, I'd say that is simply an empty activity - switch the desktop type there to folderview and add a standard panel.