KDE 3.2 a bit sluggish

[SirKnight]

Hey there. I have Fedora Core 1 with kernel 2.6.2 and I recently upgraded KDE to version 3.2. Well I think it's really great but it's actually more sluggish for me than 3.1 was. I think it's because when I first upgraded, during the first boot I was presented with the screens that let me customize it by how much eye candy and whatnot I wanted and I must have gone too far. :) I seem to remember this one dialog that had this slider where if it's moved all the way to the right would make the eye candy part at its best and all the way to the left would be for pure performance. Well I moved it all the way to the right and I think now I shouldn't have done that. Is there any way to get that screen back so I can adjust it for better performance? I looked through all the settings under the control center and tried to do what I could there. It seems rather odd that it would be sluggish on my system. I have an XP 2600+, 512mb ram, GeForce FX 5600U.

Thanks.

[mdwatts]

Originally posted by SirKnight
Is there any way to get that screen back so I can adjust it for better performance? I looked through all the settings under the control center and tried to do what I could there.

The screensaver setup screen has a option for setting the priority. Is that it?

Have you had a look through all the KDE Control Center options to see if you can locate that slider?

[asklepios]

yeah that thing is quite weird and i faced the same situation. i couldn't find it either but then i forgot abt it as i had to re-install.
btw have you tried deleting .kde folder in your home directory?

[mdwatts]

Originally posted by asklepios
Have you tried deleting .kde folder in your home directory?

Good suggestion though you will loose all your KDE settings of which you will need to reconfigure. Should fix the problem though.

[SirKnight]

Thanks for the replys, I'll be sure and try that. It's ok that my settings get wiped out, it's not like I did a lot of customizing anyway, just a few little things here and there.

[ashoksagar]

press alt+f2 and type in 'kpersonalizer' without the quotes and hit enter.

[bandwidth_pig]

I too recently upgraded to 3.2. And I have found it be very responsive. A little more so than 3.1. And I would think with your hardware, that the extras really shouldn't slow you down that much. What I was curious about though, was did you remove the old KDE entirely before installing the new? I have had some problems with responsiveness when I have not removed older versions of KDE when upgrading.

[SirKnight]

Sorry for the delay in replying. I removed the .kde directory and after a KDE restart it did take me through the "firstboot" stage again to allow me to adjust those eye candy things I was talking about. Well I did that and it did help, but I noticed I'm still getting this one problem. It gets worse the more programs/windows I have open. What happens is that lets say I have a number of programs running and they are all minimized on the task bar. (I know I'm using Windows terminology here but I don't know what else to call it :)). Now most of the time when I go to click on one of my programs to bring it into view again, everything freezes and wont repond of any more clicks. I noticed if I hit the ALT key it fixes it and lets me go clicking again. Sometimes I can't bring a window back up again by using the mouse if I have a good number of things running. This also happens in the KMenu when I have a number of programs running. I'll navigate to a program in the KMenu, click on it and the menu freezes. When this starts happening I can't hardly use KDE at all.

If I have no programs going the KMenu is fine, or even just one thing running like a Konsole. So maybe this is because when I upgraded KDE I did not remove the old KDE (3.1) before installing 3.2. What I did was put all the rpms in a directory, typed "rpm -Uhv ./*.rpm --nodeps --force". So that did my upgrade.

I guess I'm going to have to completely remove KDE from my system (I'd like to keep my settings if possible) and reinstall 3.2. So I guess now my question is, how do I completely remove KDE from my system so I can reinstall 3.2 without having any old KDE installed? Also to save my settings I assume I just keep the .kde directory?

Thanks.

[mdwatts]

Originally posted by SirKnight
So maybe this is because when I upgraded KDE I did not remove the old KDE (3.1) before installing 3.2. What I did was put all the rpms in a directory, typed "rpm -Uhv ./*.rpm --nodeps --force". So that did my upgrade.

I guess I'm going to have to completely remove KDE from my system (I'd like to keep my settings if possible) and reinstall 3.2. So I guess now my question is, how do I completely remove KDE from my system so I can reinstall 3.2 without having any old KDE installed? Also to save my settings I assume I just keep the .kde directory?


Any reason as to why you used '--nodeps --force'? Did you have lots of dependency errors? If you did, that could now be the problem.

Most KDE users just upgrade over the previous version, You can try removing ALL of KDE and then reinstall though sometimes a package from the previous version is not included with the new and then you find out it's required.

Another member had the same problem recently when they omitted installing KDE during the initial distro installation and went directly to installing KDE3.2. They found the KDE logon manager was missing and the only way to get it back was to install KDM from the previous version.

[SirKnight]

Well that rpm line there is one I found on a website that talked about upgrading to kde 3.2. So I just copied what they said there. I still don't know why KDE is acting the way I described in my previous post. When I was running 3.1 everything worked good. I installed almost all rpms from kde.org for fedora so I don't think anything is missing. The only rpms I didnt install were some of the qt rpms that didn't seem important, one I think had to do w/ databases or something. I did install the qt base rpm though for sure.

[mdwatts]

You could try searching the JL forums for 'kde slow' as there have been a few posts lately on the subject. Perhaps your localhost and hostname configuration has somehow changed since upgrading KDE. Those are known to cause severe slowdowns. They will be suggested in the search results you find.

Also have a look through your system logfiles in /var/log and .xsession-errors in the users home directory.