shadowbearer's Journal: Linux Clusterf**ks

Good lord.

  A week ago or so I installed KDE 3.2 via Konstruct. Aside from one slight annoyance (moving full-screened windows resulting in a kwin crash, which I reported as a bug, with details) it worked fairly well.

  Then I made the mistake of doing a system update.

  Shortly afterward I exited KDE to do some console work.

  After that the artsd sound server would crash constantly (about 10 times a minute) once I started kde up again, whether or not I was trying to use the sound server.
  Not only that, but I could not *whatsoever* get sound to work in any mode at all, console, kde, alsa, arts, oss emu, anything at all; varying problems in all modes. This is in a updated Debian install.

  Hours of google searching, reboots, reconfigs, trying this and that, had no result whatsoever. The problems I was experiencing were so varied that I couldn't even track down a cause (although the arts server showed a backtrace into /lib/tls/lib.so.6, nothing else did). I blew away a whole evening off trying to fix this, and I'm pissed off.

  I've had similar problems with artsd a long time ago; but never, ever had a sound system so totally destroyed as it was this time. I finally did get it semi-working by completely wiping out kde's config dir, the mcop configs, the /tmp/mcop dirs, and other things, but the sound ended up with distortion that made it unuseable. No amount of tweaking whatsoever helped.

  Back in the Gentoo partition again, with some wisdom gained. So much for the latest attempt at Debian. This is ridiculous. I have never had problems like this with other window managers or with Gentoo (thinking about taking a shot at installing kde 3.2 on the Gentoo partition, but if it's going to hose my sound, well, NOT).

A very disgusted and confused geek here.

SB