[gentoo-user] Multiple instances of Dolphin automagically appear upon login

[Andrew Lowe]

Hi all,
A reworking of the subject line from my earlier post regarding pods of
Dolphins.......

I've just started up and then logged into my up to date KDE machine.
Once the machine is logged in and ready to go, I have, on the boot/login
just now, 20 instances of Dolphin running. This is straight after login,
I have done nothing to the machine after hitting "enter" when entering
my login password. This number also appears to be increasing each time
I log in.

Has anyone come across this "feature"? I use ~x86 and everything is up
to date.

Any thoughts greatly appreciated,

Andrew

[Mark Knecht]

To me it's suggestive of something messed up in a config file.

What does your .config/dolphinrc file look like?

At the level of KDE in general I have no idea what config file/files it looks at when configuring the complete desktop environment but that would be the next thing I'd go looking for.

I'm assuming (bad idea) that you've done a very simple experiment like closing all the dolphin windows and immediately logging out of KDE?

- Mark

[Andrew Lowe]

On 25/4/21 11:34 pm, Mark Knecht wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 25, 2021 at 7:12 AM Andrew Lowe <a...@wht.com.au> wrote:
>>
>> Hi all,
>> A reworking of the subject line from my earlier post regarding
> pods of
>> Dolphins.......

[snip]
...
...
[snip]

>
> To me it's suggestive of something messed up in a config file.
>
> What does your .config/dolphinrc file look like?
>
> At the level of KDE in general I have no idea what config file/files it
> looks at when configuring the complete desktop environment but that would
> be the next thing I'd go looking for.
>
> I'm assuming (bad idea) that you've done a very simple experiment like
> closing all the dolphin windows and immediately logging out of KDE?
>
> - Mark
>

Mark,
Thanks for the suggestion. It wasn't actually dolphinrc but the
~/.config/session dir that contained the problem. It appears that just
during my normal day to day usage of the machine, I would open Dolphin,
use it, then close it, rinse, repeat. The GUI would close down but some
part of Dolphin would remain running. This resulted in, the time I
finally spotted this, 28 instances of this "zombie" running.

When the machine was shutdown at the end of the day, these 20 odd
zombies would write a file into "session" for start up next time - which
they in turn did the next time the machine started up, but this time as
the full GUI + zombie.

Cleaning out session and killing all of the zombies fixed the problem.

Regards,
Andrew

[Mark Knecht]

Andrew,

   I'm glad you found the root cause and provided back information that

should be quite helpful should anyone else who runs into this issue.

Cheers,

Mark