Desktop wallpaper disappears on every boot

creaker · l33t Joined: 14 Jul 2012 Posts: 651

I think I have no so much problems with my desktop since I started to use linux at 2005

One of the problems is wallpaper disappearing on every boot. I can set it without any problem, but only until reboot. Initially I thought it occurs due to custom wallpaper location and moved it to default place: /usr/share/wallpapers. Doesn't help. After that I removed ~/.kde4 directory and rebooted. The same blank desktop. kdm.log doesn't contain any helpful information. I searched on google for last two hours without any success.
I starting to think that it may be solved by installing Windows. I have no any other idea on how do I get wallpaper on my desktop.
Of course, I can go in a true linux way and attach to KDE some props and crutches like script that will set wallpaper on every login, but I do not want to do it.
Any thoughts?

Chiitoo · Posted: Sun Aug 24, 2014 12:50 am Post subject: ><)))°€

Does it happen every time you reboot?

I have my wallpaper torn away sometimes, and on top of that, my widgets seem to be re-set as well. I use no widgets, so I don't know if they actually disappear (should probably try), but when the background image is gone, the tool-box, which I always drag to the lower right corner as small as it goes into hiding, will be in its default position again (and visible in the task-bar because widgets are not locked any longer, which they normally are on my set-up).

There's some more talk here: [SOLVED] KDE desktop settings disappear on reboot.

Does this seem similar in other ways than just the wallpaper disappearing?

I still haven't looked into it more at all, but it still happens to me occasionally, running 'unstable' everything, with a rather heftily stripped KDE-installation. Of course, the fact it only occasionally happens here, makes it pretty difficult to nail down even if I tried!

I do seem to have a bunch of 'activities' for some reason (30!). Perhaps KDE is creating a new one for whatever reason... will need to investigate. Perhaps worth a check to see if you find your 'old activities' from that list as well!
_________________
Kindest of regardses.

creaker · l33t Joined: 14 Jul 2012 Posts: 651

Thanks for reply, Chiitoo
Yes, it happened on every boot. No panels or widgets mess, no any other changes, only wallpaper disappearing.
I found one thing I have to deal with: rendering engine for kde effects. I had it set to OpenGL-2.0 by default. I changed it to OpenGL-1.2 and then changed it back to 2.0. After that I rebooted sequentially 6 or 7 times - all seemed fine. But after a long time kde session I rebooted and got a blank desktop again.
Now I switched it to OpenGL 1.2 and going to test it for a long time. Let see will it helps or not.

mrbassie · l33t Joined: 31 May 2013 Posts: 772 Location: over here

I had exactly the same problem and could not get it fixed. If you switch effects to xrender, the problem goes away, of course you lose some of the effects but at least you haven't got that ugly blue swirly thing staring at you every time you log in.

creaker · l33t Joined: 14 Jul 2012 Posts: 651

Yes, I tested it for a last day and seems it is an OpenGL issue. Neither 1.2 nor 2.0 nor 3.1 works properly. XRender works fine.

Ant P. · Watchman Joined: 18 Apr 2009 Posts: 6920

Maybe it's trying to render the entire wallpaper image as a GL texture and then failing because it's too big for the card/driver. I had that problem with E18 (and swiftly downgraded) - you could try downscaling the image manually and see if that works.

creaker · l33t Joined: 14 Jul 2012 Posts: 651

I think it is not a size issue. 765x764 pix (240kb) doesn't looks like a huge image for my card.
I noticed that the images selection dialog (button for adding new images to collection) doesn't remember last visited directory where images was added from, if I have OpenGL selected, but with XRender it opens last visited (for new images addition) directory. So I think it may be a misconfiguration in case of OpenGL. OpenGL just looses wallpaper location, even if picture located under default directory /usr/share/wallpapers.
Have to search for the file that contains wallpaper location.

Chiitoo · Posted: Wed Aug 27, 2014 5:46 pm Post subject:

Might as well update my experiences with the similar thing that's happening here:

Just today had a blank desktop once more again, and this time I had some widgets there when I last left off. They were all gone, and the activity name had changed as well (to 'New Activity'). At least this time, the old activity is not there in the list, so it was apparently completely deleted/unusable.

I should mention that I always have had the quicklaunch, application launcher, and taskbar widgets, but they are never lost. I would definitely not even use KDE if it was that bad. The single panel I have is not affected either.

Now If I look into 'add widgets', it actually shows the tested widgets being added still (with the green 'check' mark). They're nowhere to be seen though...

I've had Compositing type at OpenGL 3.1 for some time now. I forget what it was before (probably 2.0), but I shall experiment with the other options as well.
_________________
Kindest of regardses.