KDE is preventing laptop disk spindown by incessant configfile-writing
[Please keep me CC'ed! I"m not on debian-kde. Tnx.]
I've just started using Debian Sarge on a Thinkpad 240, having used
Debian on a desktop, and Mandrake 8.2 on an identical ThinkPad.
Unfortunately, it's driving me crazy, because KDE 3.2 insists on
writing out ~/.kde/share/config/kdeglobals and korgacrc every five
minutes or less, which keeps the disk spun up no matter what else I
do. (I'm also running noflushd, though that's unlikely to help me
much because I'm also using ext3fs---noflushd's manpage remarks that
ext3 writes out its journals directly, hence bypassing noflushd's
efforts.)
This is happening on a machine sitting totally idle. Short of not
running KDE, is there a workaround? I'd rather that kdeglobals got
written only when some state it's trying to track changes (like a
window rearrangement? I'm not sure what it's trying to do for me), or,
if that's not possible, then very infrequently---like once an hour.
Or only upon user request. Or never. And korgacrc is apparently for
some sort of alarm/reminder thingie that I haven't even used, yet it
insists on rewriting itself frequently.
This seems Debian-specific because I run KDE on the Mandrake laptop
and this doesn't happen; perhaps it is instead releated to running a
newer KDE version under Debian (that Mandrake installation is a couple
years old), but I haven't pursued that yet because I'm assuming that
this is a common problem (though googling for likely terms such as
`kdeglobals laptop disk' and/or other terms such as `spin' or just
`kde' hasn't been rewarding yet).
Thanks!
P.S. On the off chance that this had something to do w/using gdm as
my display manager, I edited /etc/X11/default-display-manager to be
/usr/bin/kdm instead of /usr/bin/gdm. Didn't help, although it was
-intensely- irritating that kdm then created /var/run/xauth and
/var/run/xdmctl directories that then broke any attempt to launch
applications from a shell, as opposed to from the KDE popup menus
(e.g., "emacs &" from an xterm gave authentication errors, as did
xhost! so I couldn't -fix- whatever auth problems were going on...).
Fortunately, I found the /var/run stuff by looking for any
recently-modified files, and just nuked those directories, and then I
could start X apps again (under gdm, anyway; I didn't go back to kdm
after that). This seems like a bug; if it's documented behavior, I'd
love to know why. (I haven't checked carefully to see what those dirs
think they're doing, and since deleting them fixed the behavior, I'm
assuming they were responsible.)
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