Ongoing KDE issues (linux 10.5x)

Ongoing KDE issues (linux 10.5x)

For the last 6 or 7 builds, I've been briefly posting in the desktopteam blog about my ongoing issues with Opera 10.5x running under KDE. Problems haven't been resolved and only seem to affect some systems, so I thought I'd post here with some more info. These problems remain at build 6336.

Firstly I'm running Opensuse 11 with KDE 3.5.10, along with KDE4libs installed for certain apps that require KDE4 (like dolphin, ktorrent etc.). KDE4 apps seem to run fine under KDE3 with this setup, with one exception - Opera.

Until a few days ago, I had KDE 4.2.4 libraries, and up to that point my big problem with Opera was that any function attempting to open a KDE4 dialog box (usually a file chooser, from page..open, page..save as or when downloading something from a webpage) would cause Opera to hang. Now, weirdly, if I ran some other kde4 app like ktorrent, and hit file..open from there, this would sometimes kick Opera's kde4 dialogs into life... but only sometimes. The usual behaviour was a hang, making Opera difficult to use and test.

Due to the apparent lack of other people having this issue, I thought it may be related to the fact that I was using older KDE4.2 libs, so I took the plunge and upgraded them to the latest 4.4.3 versions. This upgraded the core libraries, a number of KDE4 apps, and QT, to the latest versions. Still running the KDE3.5.10 desktop though. The outcome of this is that everything else works, but Opera's gone from bad to worse...

Now, when I launch opera from a konsole as per normal, I get a KDE4 crasher dialog, and the following error at the console:

Opera(7145): Session bus not found

KCrash: Application 'Kde4ToolkitLibrary' crashing...
sock_file=/home/seb/.kde4/socket-tptux/kdeinit4__0

Poking around online, I found that this had to do with the dbus session handler that needs to be running, and launching Opera with the following string

dbus-launch ./opera &

...fixed that issue. However, the dialog issue still remains; opening any KDE4 dialogbox from Opera causes it to hang just as before. At this point I am stuck; when I kill the hung Opera process, the associated instances of kdeinit4 and kded4 remain, so if I keep running new instances of Opera, I spawn more and more instances of these processes as well.

In sum, at this point I'm not sure how to move forward. My feeling is that my setup is a little unusual, but since everything else works as it should, the problems lie with Opera and the assumptions Opera is making about the availability and use of KDE4 libs. Running KDE4 libs and apps under KDE3 should not be a problem, and 7 or 8 builds ago it wasn't, so I'm looking for any advice or help regarding things I could reconfigure/change to allow Opera to work properly in this environment.

As a side question, is there any way I could get Opera running using alternative libraries than KDE4 (GTK/KDE3)?

Any suggestions appreciated.

Seb

Originally posted by sebt:

As a side question, is there any way I could get Opera running using alternative libraries than KDE4 (GTK/KDE3)?

Been discussed before, in opera:config set Dialog Toolkit to either 2 (for GTK) or 4 (for no toolkit). The "no toolkit" dialog has no file chooser; it consists of a couple of input boxes is all.

Thanks Steve. Now, I wonder why I'm having so many issues with the default setting?

Seb