KDE issues on tibook

[therealjrd]

I recently put KDE 4.3.3 on my tibook. There are issues

There was a driver issue issue which caused it to mis-guess the screen size. I obtained a patch from the upstream folks for that, so now the basic display functions work. But I'm left with a mess of other stuff.

Most annoying, the backlight control logic appears to be completely confused. Whenever KDE decides to reduce backlight power, it does something bizarre, which looks like jamming the backlight all the way up, concurrent with corrupting the screen display. The result is a distorted picture of whatever was on the screen, with a sort of "bloom" of backlight obscuring everything. Yes, the basic backlight stuff is working ok, pbbuttonsd is able to control and interrogate it just fine. I suspect there's some kind of kde platform stuff which is malformed for my mac.

Second, KDE (or something) seems to get confused sometimes about what screen it's supposed to show. I got rid of the "Air" screen, and changed it to something simple, but when it goes into screen-saver mode, it sometimes goes back to "Air", with an analog clock face in the upper left corner. No idea where that's coming from; I told it to use the "Tux" saver.

If I let KDE idle too long, it gets into some mode where even when you try to wake it up again, the screen stays off. The only way short of rebooting to get it back is to close the lid or otherwise force it into hibernate mode, then start it up again. Looking at system and X logs, it appears that going to hibernate and back is a pretty big hammer, it resets all sorts of things in the display logic. My guess is that KDE has something missing in its wakeup code.

Even though I tried to disable screen locking everywhere I could, when it goes into saver mode and back out, the screen is locked.

When the screen is locked, it gets the sense of the capslock key backwards.


alien ~ # equery l kde-meta
[ Searching for package 'kde-meta' in all categories among: ]
* installed packages
[I--] [ ] kde-base/kde-meta-4.3.3 (4.3)
alien ~ # equery l video-ati
[ Searching for package 'video-ati' in all categories among: ]
* installed packages
[I--] [ ] x11-drivers/xf86-video-ati-6.12.4 (0)
alien ~ # equery l xorg-server
[ Searching for package 'xorg-server' in all categories among: ]
* installed packages
[I--] [ ] x11-base/xorg-server-1.6.3.901-r2 (0)
alien ~ #

That's the stuff I found so far. Ring bells with anyone? Hints? Thanks in advance...

[audiodef]

I know the whole KDE 4 line is a complete departure from everything KDE did before, and that kinks are still being worked out. Perhaps you should file a bug report and be very specific about the hardware.

Course, my experience with the KDE devs has been "bug off!", but they do need to hear about this stuff.
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[nixnut]

Moved from Desktop Environments to Gentoo on PPC.
probably better off here
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