Bug 280834 – [patch] KDE 4.3.0 adding world clock plasmoid hangs plasma-desktop and causes cpu spin

• Status: RESOLVED FIXED
• Product: Gentoo Linux

[Description Aidan Marks 2009-08-08 23:10:41 UTC]

With KDE 4.3.0, attempting to add the world clock plasmoid (from the marble package) to the desktop does not work and simply results in the plasma-desktop PID spinning at 100% cpu and hanging the desktop.  killing and restarting the plasma-desktop process does recover from this scenario.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Start KDE 4.3.0
2. Add the world clock plasmoid to the desktop.


Actual Results:  
The plasma-dekstop process enters a cpu spin and must be killed/restarted to restore the desktop.

Expected Results:  
The plasmoid should successfully be added to the desktop.

[Comment 1 Tomáš Chvátal (RETIRED) 2009-08-09 11:09:39 UTC]

Please please report such issues to upstream too [1].
Because we should solve only packaging issues and this looks more like upstream coding issue.

Add to the report also what graphic card you have and what drivers on it.

[1] - https://bugs.kde.org/

[Comment 2 Sverre Anmarkrud 2009-08-09 18:52:09 UTC]

I had this problem. While OP didn't post much info, what likely happens is a font issue. The plasmoid is set to use Helvetica, which fontconfig matches to a bitmap font on a standard gentoo install:

# fc-match Helvetica
helvR12-ISO8859-1.pcf.gz: "Helvetica" "Regular"

If Helvetica matches a bitmap font the plasmoid will go into an infinite loop trying to increase the size of the font (according to a bug report upstream). 

I suggest the OP tries the following as root:
# eselect fontconfig enable 70-no-bitmaps.conf

Upon restarting KDE (or just plasma-desktop), world clock should work. 

[Comment 3 Aidan Marks 2009-08-09 23:44:12 UTC]

(In reply to comment #2)
setting fontconfig as you suggest does fix it, however it makes the Terminus font unavailable for use which I use in Konsole, so this does not seem to be a good workaround for me :(

[Comment 4 Sverre Anmarkrud 2009-08-10 02:06:13 UTC]

If you still want fontconfig to choose bitmap fonts, you can blacklist the installed Helvetica font until upstream fixes this. Fontconfig will then choose the next closest font, Nimbus Sans L on my system.

As user, create the file ~/.fonts.conf (or insert the appropriate part if it exists):

<?xml version='1.0'?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM 'fonts.dtd'>
<fontconfig>
  <selectfont>
        <rejectfont>
                <pattern>
                        <patelt name="family">
                        <string>Helvetica</string></patelt>
                </pattern>
        </rejectfont>
 </selectfont>
</fontconfig>

Relevant upstream bug: 
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=189633

[Comment 5 Dennis Nienhüser (RETIRED) 2009-11-15 14:21:47 UTC]

Should be fixed in KDE 4.3.4 (due 2009-12-01) and KDE 4.4.0 (due 2010-02-09). Please test.

[Comment 6 Tomáš Chvátal (RETIRED) 2009-11-15 14:37:10 UTC]

bugzie

[Comment 7 Tomáš Chvátal (RETIRED) 2009-11-22 12:10:07 UTC]

Fixed in main tree.
Thanks for report.