Hi all-

I am running MEPIS (the 10.2004 version, not the new beta) on a Compaq laptop. I posted this scenario over on mepis.org but sometimes those forums are a little slow. So I put this to you all as well.

The other day I was running KPackage and it hung up on me -- don't know exactly what happened, but I installed something and when it was done, the program got stuck when it was reading the package list while going back to the main screen. When I say "stuck" what I saw was the KPackage window went completely gray except for the menu bar, and the hourglass/busy symbol kept going and going and never finished.

I used XKill to kill the process and it seemed to do so. But when I logged off and came back on the next day, this still-running KPackage came up on the screen. It wouldn't close, and so I used XKIll again to get rid of it. Again it came up this morning when I turned the computer
back on. A ps -l command shows no sign of KPackage being a currently-running process. And yet there it is on the screen.

And the same thing is happening with my shell (I am using Konsole). I opened up Konsole to log in as root to see if I could locate and really kill the KPackage process, but when I did "exit" once and then again to close out the Konsole window, nothing happened. I used XKill to clear it off and it seemed to work, but when I logged back on this morning, there was that shell, still running.

Starting up a new KPackage session yields the same results -- it gives me a "Querying DEB APT available list" at the bottom of the screen, but nothing appears on the screen and it appears to just be locked up.

Having these processes show up on the screen when I log on is irritating, but more importantly I cannot use KPackage or close out any of my shell sessions.

Ideas?

Did you just log off, or did you try a complete reboot? When I had kpackage stuck or some other program stuck, the only way to get it completely closed was to reboot my computer and if the program came back up, it allowed me to just close it and it was gone.

BTW, I quit using kpackage because apt-get and compiling works better on my Mepis system. Kpackage will continue to get stuck if you keep using it.

This was a complete reboot -- in fact TWO complete reboots. ANd I did try just closing the windows when I rebooted, but nothing happened.

I'm starting to feel the same way about apt-get and compiling myself. Synaptic is pretty nice too.

Maybe it's restoring the session.

You could be right, bejayzed. Bert Bert, can you try just letting the program sit for awhile and then see if it eventually comes back to where you can close it?

If it doesn't close you can tell KDE to start with an empty session. With the kde control centre->components->session manager.

We have a winner! This was all I needed to do, and the problem is solved. So evidently the processes had been killed, but KDE kept trying to start up what was left of them anyway.

Also, even after I changed this setting, my console sessions wouldn't close out when I typed "exit". But I upgraded my version of Konsole and everything seems peachy.

Thanks for all the help.