A surplus of activities (fixed)

[pinoc]

It may have to do with xrandrrc because kcmrandrrc never ever existed anywhere in the system.
Is there a reliable procedure to create a "New Activity", obviously not by creating it yourself.

Such a procedure would be helpful to debug this event.
-p.

[Bald Brick]

One should perhaps remember that the problem of New Activities propagating by parthenogenesis is not a new bug. It has been there since KDE first got activities. Most people didn't notice then since they didn't use activities.

I did a Google search about a year and a half ago, and on some other distro's forum I read that the problem had been resolved and the bug fixed, but the link explaining the fix just recommended removing, not only two or three configuration files, but all of ~/.kde4 (or was it ~/.kde?) - which is a bit like curing headaches by decapitation.

On the other hand getting rid of a couple of New Activities manually once a week is not really a burden - and if Pinoc can automate it even less so. But this is an issue that the Plasma developers must have been aware of for several years.

[Just17]

     I wish it was only a couple per week .......  how about 60 to 90?   

If it is a known KDE bug then there is not much we can do about it, except to delete the unwanted activities I guess.

[mellon]

Yes, or to follow the advice and completely replace .kde4

I logged out of my laptop. Used a failsafe login and moved the .kde4 to .kde4-good

I logged in and what I got was this:
A single desktop with a menu icon, a desktop icon (or is it a pager?) and a firefox icon on the left and a complete system tray. My desktop was empty and with no image. Just a black background.
I opened the Configure Your Desktop tool from the menu and checked the virtual desktops: only 1. The checkbox for different widgets on each desktop was Off. Just as I want it (and had it setup/left it previously)
I opened the activities window and there was one active Desktop activity and 3 inactive Activities (the same inactive 3 after a boot with the LiveCD).

Then I started to rebuild my desktop.
I deleted the inactive activities. Renamed the Desktop activity and added three empty desktop activities. I added Configure your desktop, Configure your Computer, Synaptic, Dolphin and Konsole icons. I added smooth tasks and an activity bar in the panel and rebooted.
No new activity after the reboot, but the 3 new ones were made inactive. I revived them and rebooted again. This time they stayed and no new one was added.
I continued making changes like e.g. choosing the Glassified theme (which actually looks better. The logout popup is now transparent in stead of having a solid black background). I changed the country to Netherlands (but I use a GB locale setting) and got a KDE crash after changing the short date format. As usual the desktop restored to normal and I continued by setting up the background images for the Desktop activities. That always requires two attempts before they stick.
I did a shutdown. Powered back on and (no new activity) added the News widget to my News activity.  I added the feeds I needed. I then opened the news.css file from the stylesheets folder in the usr share desktoptheme folder to increase (yes I'm getting older) the font sizes of the news widget. I logged out and in to see the result. No new activity and the news widget used the new new font settings.
I continued with setting up a series of widgets on the Widgets activity followed by another shutdown and a new boot. No New Activity
I changed the file name of startupconfigkeys. Logged out and in. No new activity.

Took me about 30-45 minutes.

I will monitor the laptop for the next few days. If it stays as stable as new, then I'll do the same on my PC and the laptop of my Dad.

Mellon

[pinoc]

Hi Mellon,

now on this new desktop, open a konsole and enter:

Code: [Select]

killall plasma-desktop; plasma-desktopThis command will restart plasma-desktop and usually creates a "New Activity". Can you confirm this?
-p.

[rich2005]

I've had to follow the posts on a netbook (6 year old monitor died last Saturday) Back up and running again. I've tried some of the fixes, eg. the 'startupxxx' files. No good. As a workaround I have cleaned out the activitymanagerrc file, copied to a backup location and that gets copied across using a bash script in Autostart . Should keep things under control for the time being.

Still interested in the outcome of Mellon's test & thanks for all the advice.

[mellon]

Alas ! I started my laptop with the new desktop I set up yesterday and lo and behold; a New Activity ! And on my PC where I had not yet engaged in replacing .kde4 I also got a new activity.

The fif command on the laptop only found "New Activity" in plasma-desktop-appletsrc and activitymanagerrc. The New Activity is visible in the activity bar as an active Desktop Activity. If I log out and log in then the new activity has been made inactive! But it is still there. And this time fif finds it in kglobalshortcutsrc on the laptop as well. I deleted it an logged out and in again and fif still finds it in kglobalshortcutsrc.

I then ran the command suggested by Pinoc killall plasma-desktop ; plasma-desktop
No New Activity was created the first time I ran it, but I ran it about three times and on the last one a new activity was created.

Each time I got a lot of feedback in konsole. Too much to dump here. I have dumped the last one in a txt file if needed. There is nothing showing New Activity in the dumped text.

Here are some fragments

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killall plasma-desktop; plasma-desktop
QDBusConnection: session D-Bus connection created before QCoreApplication. Application may misbehave.
QDBusConnection: session D-Bus connection created before QCoreApplication. Application may misbehave.
QDBusObjectPath: invalid path ""
plasma-desktop(11072)/libplasma Plasma::isPluginVersionCompatible: unversioned plugin detected, may result in instability
plasma-desktop(11072)/libplasma Plasma::isPluginVersionCompatible: unversioned plugin detected, may result in instability
plasma-desktop(11072)/libplasma Plasma::isPluginVersionCompatible: unversioned plugin detected, may result in instability
plasma-desktop(11072)/libplasma Plasma::isPluginVersionCompatible: unversioned plugin detected, may result in instability
and

Code: [Select]

[me@localhost ~]$ file:///usr/share/apps/plasma/plasmoids/notifier/contents/ui/devicenotifier.qml:167:5: QML QDeclarativeListView_QML_20: Possible anchor loop detected on vertical anchor.
QGraphicsScene::addItem: item has already been added to this scene
X Error: BadValue (integer parameter out of range for operation) 2
  Major opcode: 53 (X_CreatePixmap)
  Resource id:  0x0
X Error: BadDrawable (invalid Pixmap or Window parameter) 9                                                                                                 
  Major opcode: 14 (X_GetGeometry)                                                                                                                           
  Resource id:  0x24002a4                                                                                                                                   
X Error: BadWindow (invalid Window parameter) 3                                                                                                             
  Major opcode: 3 (X_GetWindowAttributes)                                                                                                                   
  Resource id:  0x9f3cff8
QPainter::begin: Cannot paint on a null pixmap
X Error: BadDrawable (invalid Pixmap or Window parameter) 9
  Extension:    153 (RENDER)
  Minor opcode: 4 (RenderCreatePicture)
  Resource id:  0x24002a4
X Error: BadValue (integer parameter out of range for operation) 2
  Major opcode: 53 (X_CreatePixmap)
  Resource id:  0x0
and

Code: [Select]

Could not resolve property : linearGradient4504
link XMLID_34_ hasn't been detected!
link XMLID_34_ hasn't been detected!
link XMLID_36_ hasn't been detected!
[me@localhost ~]$ plasma-desktop(11072)/plasma StatusNotifierItemSource::refreshCallback: DBusMenu disabled for this application
QGridLayoutEngine::addItem: Cell (0, 1) already taken                                                                                                       
plasma-desktop(11072)/kdecore (KConfigSkeleton) KCoreConfigSkeleton::writeConfig:                                                                           
plasma-desktop(11072)/kdecore (KConfigSkeleton) KCoreConfigSkeleton::writeConfig:                                                                           
plasma-desktop(11072)/libplasma Plasma::isPluginVersionCompatible: unversioned plugin detected, may result in instability                                   
plasma-desktop(11072)/plasma StatusNotifierItemSource::refreshCallback: DBusMenu disabled for this application                                               
plasma-desktop(11072)/plasma StatusNotifierItemSource::refreshCallback: DBusMenu disabled for this application                                               
                                                   
By the way. The fif command on the laptop is the one provided by Pinoc. It found occurrences of "New Activity". I copied the .bashrc file to my PC and it simply does not find any files with the text, but they do exist. If I amend the find command string they are found. I have no idea why the results of the same .bashrc file are so different.

At least we know that setting up the desktop from scratch does not help.

Mellon

[mellon]

It is possible to create and remove activities via qdbus commands in konsole.  Could this also be used to create a script to remove excess 'New Activity' activities?

Type qdbus org.kde.kactivitymanagerd /ActivityManager in konsole and you'll get a list of methods used within the ActivityManager

Type qdbus org.kde.kactivitymanagerd /ActivityManager AddActivity 'test' and you'll have a new activity with the name test
The activity id is returned; e.g. c80ca58f-275a-4ab4-8cc4-1ba660f6f7df

Type qdbus org.kde.kactivitymanagerd /ActivityManager RemoveActivity c80ca58f-275a-4ab4-8cc4-1ba660f6f7df and the activity is gone.

Mellon

[pinoc]

ok, if you are willing to test clean_nac (Clean New Activitiy) then please check here.

thanks!
-p.

[ternor]

I tried deleting all entries marked as "New Activity."  One consequence was that the 'cashew', previously named "Tool Box" in the 'tip' appearing when the mouse hovers over it became "New Activity," moved to a different position and became immoveable.

[Just17]

ok, if you are willing to test clean_nac (Clean New Activitiy) then please check here.

thanks!
-p.

Seems to be working fine here so far.

[ternor]

I use "Desktop layout" rather than "Folder View."  Will the new script work on the former?  Each desktop is labelled as a new activity.

[Just17]

I use "Desktop layout" rather than "Folder View."  Will the new script work on the former?  Each desktop is labelled as a new activity.

Rename them .....  and yes it works as that is what I use

[ternor]

Thanks.  Just what I wanted to know.

aaargh!  Too late, now I have more.

[ternor]

The download I got is an rpm.  It failed to install the script:

$ rpm -ivh *.rpm
error: can't create transaction lock on /var/lib/rpm/__db.000 (No such file or directory)
$