Journal of Post-Ralphaelite Thought

Okay -- a follow up on my previous post about KDE 4's apparent memory leak. Despite following the steps I listed I found I was still prone to creeping molasses. Here's what I ended up doing, which seems to have helped. First, uninstalled all of the widget libraries I could locate (relax -- I reinstalled them). Then I went in and basically re-installed KDE 4, using Synaptic. I'll note for the record I don't have a lot of love for the newest release of Adept; it's a sorry downgrade of the version that came with KDE 3. Next I installed OpenBox , which is an alternative window manager. Once completed, I had the option, when logging in, of starting my session with KDE / OpenBox. This substitutes the OpenBox window manager for Kwin , the default KDE window manager, while retaining the KDE look and feel. Compared to Kwin, OpenBox is a light weight . I confess, I can see no discernible difference between the two once I've logged in -- other than the fact tha...

For the last month or so my Kubuntu Linux box has been plagued by a particular problem: after running for a little while it would gradually become more and more unresponsive, to the point of unusability. I'm running Jaunty Jackalope on a pretty quick Intel chip, with 2 GB of memory. I've got a 256 MB NVidia video card to boot -- one previously purchased by youngest son (the gamer). I'd walk away from my desktop and find when I came back it was stuck in molasses. Clicking on a button would do .... nothing. I'd have to hold the mouse button down and wait.  And wait.  And wait . Usually I've found this sort of weirdness can be explained by overheating, but that didn't seem to be the case here. Couple that with the fact that I didn't see the problem when running another window manager and signs pointed to an issue with KDE 4. After suffering through this for a while, I discussed the situation with clever youngest son ( now a freshman computer science / inf...