User Switching Problems

I'm having the same issue but I'm NOT using Beryl and I DON'T have an ATI or Nvidia card.

I have a Compaq Presario 8000 with Intel 845 on board graphics.

I have had this experience with 6.0 of Mepis. I think it's a bug in KDE. Try pressing the Switch User option a second time and/or press ctrl+alt+f8 and see if there's a login screen there. It seems that KDE gets "stuck" and can't quite get to the new screen. Like I say, I think (but am not positive) that it's a KDE issue.

Jon

No computer is magic, no operating system is magic, no website is magic. They all require human interaction, thought, and responsibility to work.

"Try pressing the Switch User option a second time "

I don't get the chance. Clicking it ONCE sends me to the black screen...

"and/or press ctrl+alt+f8 and see if there's a login screen there."

Nope. I tried ctrl-alt F-everything, starting with F8...nothing.

I'm running 6.5 Final and when I go to switch users I get a black screen also.All I have to do is move the mouse a little and a log-in box shows up right away.Don't know if this will help you any or not.Wayne.

I wish getting mine back was that easy. But once it goes black it refuses to come back...

Here is another thread that may have the problem solved.
Running With my Eyes Wide Shut... | MEPIS
http://www.mepis.org/node/12862

It is towards the bottom under "KDE Switch User error fixed".

Jon

No computer is magic, no operating system is magic, no website is magic. They all require human interaction, thought, and responsibility to work.

I'm wondering if you could be running out of RAM causing the issues.

I've got a relatively fresh install of 6.5 on a PC, and a quick look at KSensors earlier showed 624MB of RAM being used with nothing other than Firefox loaded (only one copy with 6 tabs). KInfocenter confirmed that it's "applicatyon data" versus cache or other. tops shows firefox-bin and Xorg as the memory hogs.

The PC has not been rebooted in over 85 hours.

But, yesterday, I did logout of one session and start another. So, I don't know if that could be a contributing factor or not.

There is only one session now (but, RAM usage is amazing).

Just for grins, I checked my wife's laptop a little while ago and it's using 124MB of RAM right now after approximately 97 hours without a reboot. But, it's running 6.0-4 Beta 4 instead of 6.5 Final.

I can remember prevous posts thinking that gtk2-engines-gtk-qt was the culprit eating the RAM. But, that package is not installed on my PC.

For that matter, I haven't installed anything on this PC yet, other than some new fonts (via the KDE Font installer), which was the reason I logged out of a session and logged back in again yesterday.

I'm not even running the Nvidia accelerated drivers yet on this box(I haven't bothered to switch to them, so I'm using the nv driver right now).

I'm going to reboot and see if the RAM usage goes back up again.

EDIT/ADDED:

Reboot completed. Started with 77MB of RAM being used (now a bit over 100MB with Firefox running). I'll keep an eye on it and see if it climbs back up again over time. It's a good thing I've got 1GB of RAM in this PC, with usage climbing to over 600MB over time with nothing other than Firefox being used

Jim C.

As I understand it, in Linux (and in Mac OS X), the system will USE as much RAM as is available for various processes. I often wondered why my Mac's RAM was ALWAYS maxed out even with the least app running.

So, if the RAM is available, it will find something to put in it until it runs out of things to find, so I'm not sure that a full RAM indication really means that you are "out of RAM". If you start another app, it should just page out the low priority stuff to disk. This IS different from Windows.

Of course, I got this thirdhand, so it could be completely wrong.

The >600MB of RAM was application data, not Cache buffers, etc.

Something is not quite right here. I see no reason that Firefox would be eating as much RAM as it was. Ditto for Xorg.

Perhaps there is something in their code that caches data internally somehow eating it up. But, seeing that much RAM (624MB) being used is a bit disturbing. It was over 700MB at one point before I closed some extra Firefox sessions.

Usually, closing Firefox (all copies) gets most of it back (and I do that relatively often). Right before rebooting, I did close Firefox, and application data was *still* eating approximately 384MB of RAM (mostly Xorg).

Now, it's not uncommon for me to have a dozen or so copies of firefox loaded at the same time (with multiple tabs in some). But, with only one copy of Firefox loaded, and nothing else loaded or being used, other than the services normally started by SimplyMEPIS), >600MB of RAM seems pretty excessive.

I don't know what is triggering that much RAM usage. I'll keep an eye on it periodically to see if something else I'm doing could be a contributing factor.

Jim C.