[Solved] Lots of kde crashes - mostly pointing to libqt-mt.so.3

such as:
- which version of Mepis?
- updated? From which repos?
- when does it crash? Spontaneoulsy? With certain apps?

try to give us some idea of the general picture, so we don't have to jump in blindfolded...

Newbie or not Newbie, there's always a question

Thanks for the quick reply.

- which version of Mepis?

The the 6.0 finial version.

- updated? From which repos?

This is a new install on a dual boot system with windowsXP. The XP is on the primary IDE drive and MEPIS is on a SATA drive. The iso is from the ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/mepis/released
download ftp site.

- when does it crash? Spontaneoulsy? With certain apps?

Unfortunately I cannot isolate the stimulus for the crash. Originally I thought it was related to the use of tabs in konqueror but I cannot consistently reproduce a sequence that causes it and other applications have crashed beside konqueror. Sorry I can give you a better clue.

- Newbie or not Newbie, there's always a question

I am new to MEPIS but have been using Damn Small Linux for about 9 months on another machine without too many issues other than the limitation of the DSL OS.

The things to start checking should be the following:

1. did you verify the md5sum for the iso?

2. did you check the md5sum for the burned disk?

3. does this also happen when you are running from the live CD, or only on the installed version?

4. Is there any exotic hardware on your machine, or do you have ATI or Nvidia closed drivers installed?

It's just a bunch of loose questions, but we need to start someplace, right?

Some other recommendations:

- install all upgrades in synaptic, see if that helps
- there is a new kernel available. It will show under the same version number, so you have to reinstall the kernel.

'bout my sig: in no way was that a persoanl comment. I just wanted to give Shakespeare a place in modern society

Newbie or not Newbie, there's always a question

1. did you verify the md5sum for the iso?
2. did you check the md5sum for the burned disk?

To be honest, I just don't remember and so I am doing another download and will give it a try if I get too frustrated with the current install.

3. does this also happen when you are running from the live CD, or only on the installed version?

It did happen with the live CD but without gdb I could not get a function trace.

4. Is there any exotic hardware on your machine, or do you have ATI or Nvidia closed drivers installed?

The graphics card is a RADEON ATI 9600 (I think I got that right). I loaded the linux driver fglrx provided in the display configuration tool for the ATI card.

Also this a AMD 64 bit 3500+ processor. I hope this is not a problem with the i386 build because I prefer using MEPIS and I can not find a 64 bit build for MEPIS. I assumed the 32 bit OS would work with the 64 bit processor the same as windows but may this is a bad assumption.

It's just a bunch of loose questions, but we need to start someplace, right?

No problem. I like what I see but for me to use this OS I need to resolve this issue and I don't mean to say it is your issue. I have not ruled out a configuration or hardware issue. But I do not have many problems with XP although I don't use it too much.

for you to have installed again with a fresh iso and cd, and see what happens. BTW: you can do an md5sum check on the current iso of course...

If it happened on the live CD we can rule out the fglrx driver, since that is not the default on the CD. At the moment my bet would be a bad burn....

Newbie or not Newbie, there's always a question

Assuming all is correct with the .iso integrity, and you got a correct burn, I'm thinking that there may be some lower-level issues going on.

Make sure your machine isn't overclocked in the slightest and, at some point, take the opportunity to run memtest to get an idea of what kind of shape your memory happens to be in.

FURTHER MUSINGS (at this point):
Most of this stuff looks like it's happening up in 0x47 and 0xb7, which makes me wonder about your AGP aperture, or shared video memory allocation; as well as possibly the IRQ steering load if you're fast-flipping between high bus bandwidth consumers. Typically, that would be a video card and NIC (assuming that you're on CAT5x-connected broadband or a LAN).

If your network adapter is sharing an IRQ with the video card, you'd probably want to reassign one or the other through your BIOS configuration.

Also, set your AGP aperture size in accordance with your motherboard recommendations.

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Must Reads for Newbies:
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http://www.tldp.org/

I down loaded the image, verified the md5sum and create a new cd.

I found this scenerio to consistently fail on two different computers. Admittedly both have similar graphic cards ATI 9600. The failure occurs using the liveCD on both computers and on one computer it fails on a HD install as well.

- open konqueror

- enter the url www.cnn.com
I get a popup block message and then it disappears. No
issue.

- click on the FULL STORY link or any other link.

For me it crashes.

Using firefox there is no issue.

On SM <= 3.3-4 (Matrox Graphics), this is not a scenario which can be duplicated.

On SM 6.0-Final (Toshiba Notebook, Trident Microsystems CyberBlade/i1), I can duplicate your results: It takes down Konqueror completely (Konq only. KDE remains untouched), with CPU load and physical memory usage spiking exponentially.

Likewise with SM 6.0-Final (Matrox Graphics).

My older SM installation is highly customized, and may have certain plugins installed and configured which the 6.0 installation lacks (I've been fiddling with it for a few years, now).

I'll snoop-around along the lines of plugins and supporting libraries, to see if I can come up with something more intelligent to offer you. Otherwise, we're probably looking at a Qt/KHTML issue.

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Must Reads for Newbies:
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http://www.tldp.org/

it is indeed my experience that Konqueror is a VERY fine file manager, but not the most stable browser out there. I use it from time to time, but it crashes frequently, especially on streaming content. I have not tried this specific case, but overall Firefox is much more reliable.

I would like to ask dtf if there are broader KDE related issues or only specific 'Konqueror as webbrowser' issues. In the latter case, I doubt if it can be completely remedied.

Newbie or not Newbie, there's always a question

Thanks for looking into this. Knowing that this is reproduceable is half the battle. I don't know which web pages cause this problem but not all do. In any case I can avoid using Konqueror as a web browser until it is fixed.

I'm wondering, dtf, if you would do me a favor?

Please email your entire backtrace(s) and a link to this thread to .

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Must Reads for Newbies:
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http://www.tldp.org/

carlops writes:

I would like to ask dtf if there are broader KDE related issues or only specific 'Konqueror as webbrowser' issues. In the latter case, I doubt if it can be completely remedied

Sorry - I missed your comment when I posted my previous comment. When I first started seeing the crashes I was not sure what I was doing that was causing them. I started looking at the gdb data and did not think about what it was that I did previous to the crash so I can not be sure of all the circumstances that might have caused them. However, I can tell you that since I realized what scenario seem to be causing at least some of the crashes and have avoided using konqeror as a web browser, I have not seen another one.

As a new user, and this is my opinion, I believe that if a product provides a functionality (i.e. web browsing) it should do it without crashing or the functionality should be removed. I agree that konqueror is a fine file manager and there is nothing wrong with just providing that capability without the web browsing. The problem I see with trying to do something that only works partially is that it gives a bad impression of entire OS to new users.

Anyway let me climb down from my soap box and say that I appreciate all the effort that has gone into MEPIS. I have had a lot of fun playing around with it. I hope to try the Lite version and home/office version in the future.

Settings --> Configure Konqueror --> Plugins --> Netscape Plugins --> [ Plugins ] --> (X) Use artsdsp to pipe sound through aRts
As shown below:

For me, after checking the box, there are no more Konq bail-outs in the situation you specified.

Try it out and, if it works for you, we can mark this one as: [ SOLVED ] .

FOLLOW UP:
Never mind. My bad.
I ended-up clicking on the one link on the current page that doesn't issue a call that makes Konq throw a SIGSEGV.

Still working on it.

In the meantime, you might want to consider installing the plugins in the above screenshot, as the ss is from the SM installation that does not have problems with the CNN site. Despite what other folks may have said, this is the first instance of Konq crashes that I've ever encountered; and I have always found Konq to be far more stable than any other browser--Firefox and Opera included.

This leaves me to wonder if we aren't dealing with a plugin issue? As far as WAGs go, it's as good as anything else I can come up with.

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Must Reads for Newbies:
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OK.
I've got it to a point where Konq will navigate cnn.com without segfaulting. It will, however, complain about their java script and object calls.

Open up Synaptic and install moz-plugger, along with every other browser plugin that you can locate. When you're done, dispatch the app and forget about it.

Open up Konq and do the:
Settings --> Configure Konqueror --> Plugins --> Netscape Plugins --> [ Scan ]
click-path.

Add the following to your scan directory listing:

and rescan for plugins. (Setting it to scan for new plugins at startup is a good idea.)

Switch to the [ Plugins ] tab and verify the presence of (at minimum) the following:

At this point, restarting Konq would probably be a good thing to do, and I really don't remember the exact sequence of events in getting to this point, as I was working on this off-and-on while I was cooking dinner, this evening.

It's my opinion that adding the paths to 'mplayerplug-in.so' , 'javaplugin.so' and 'rpnp.so' (I still need to grab the np-helix plugin as well.) will take care of the rest of the cnn.com weirdness...but it doesn't crash at the moment, and I've crawled all over their site with Konqueror.

It's pretty obvious that some plugin error trapping code needs to be added someplace in Konq, before libqt-mt.so.3.3.6 falls into the logical path of execution.

Website: http://www.gabston-howell.org/
WebLog: http://www.gabston-howell.org/wl/
Must Reads for Newbies:
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http://www.tldp.org/

dtf, you're right of course that things should work. I should explain that in no way did I mean just to take things for granted if they can be resolved. However, it is a known fact that (e.g.) java and flash plugins for Linux have quirks that are outside the distro developers' sphere of influence. So a solution will not be always a hand.

I must admit though that Allan's investigations seem to dig up some results that may lead to a fix. Let's hope it works.

Newbie or not Newbie, there's always a question

I appreciate the work all of you have done to understand and resolve this quickly. This speaks volumns for the dedication of the engineers working on the project.

Sorry for my lack of understanding of plug-ins and how they work but I was not sure how to populate all the ones needed for the konqueror browser but will try Allen's instructions later tonite as I will be away for my computer for most of the day.

carlops writes:
it is a known fact that (e.g.) java and flash plugins for Linux have quirks that are outside the distro developers'

-----

Yes, I can understand that and understand the limitations. I think it is mostly a question of perception from the user, particularly someone who is not technically savy.

On these types of errors you get a crash popup telling you of an internal error. This makes me think there are serious issues with software or hardware. If it is a question of missing plug-ins or other known issues, I think it would be better, if possible, to tell the user that they need additional plug-ins or it just can not handle the requests. The crash pop-up seems so ominous (sp?).

I started using konq as a web browser because of the tabbing. It is nice to be able to have your file manager list out you directors/files, network shares and web pages using tabs and not have to manage multiple windows.

Great! It took a while but once I found the opensc-signer.so plugin and loaded it, I no long crash with links on the www.cnn.com page. Thanks again for all the help and support. I hope this can help in a small way to make MEPIS even better than it already is. Good Job!!!