All widgets gone for no reason? home screen is unresponsive? Media player widget play button stop working? My Idea
 

Do You Have the Symptoms listed bellow on your N900? Don’t feel like Nokia have done anything to resolve the issue since reported on 2010-01-31? Sick of waiting and want to contribute ideas and maybe a fix for this issue?

_______________Symptoms_______________
*You Media player widget play button stop working
*you lost all of your widgets for no reason
*you have high CPU usage
*your home screen is unresponsive
*your N900 comes slow and jerky after a few days
*your N900 battery starts to drain fast until you restart
________________________________________


_______________Problem_______________

* PR1.2 was seriously delayed for many reasons but one of those reasons which is still not fixed is this bug https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8723 . This bug is the main cause of the above symptoms. (there are many other bug reports)
________________________________________


_______________Evidence_______________

This is a quote from chemist (Linux 2x debian stable 1x testing ) who can confirm this was a delay justification but the issue has by no means gone away and will never go away until you get a new device. Don’t plan on nokia to fix it as a bad widget will bring the issue right back again.

http://www.forums.internettablettalk.com/showpost.php?p=649228&postcount=29
___________________________________





_______________My FIX – Idea points_______________

-Points of proposal-
1: Create a new hildon process called ‘hildon-widget’
2: Separate widgets from hildon-home completely
3: Layer of hildon-home and multiple instances of hildon-widget
4: Each individual widget owns an instance of hildon-widget and doesn't affect any other instance as currently a widget breaks, the whole phone breaks and a restart won’t fix it.
5: A widget using a instance of hildon-widget starts to break due to bugs, memory leaks, high CPU usage and hangs it auto restart’s a fresh copy of hildon-widget with the widget back on the screen automatically without the user being aware.
6: When a widget does crash and restarts itself, it dump’s information into an event log so it can easily be debugged or redeveloped. No more looking around for weeks on end.


Know what I mean? Maybe someone can code this? This just puts me off if I was a developer as I would be worried to develop widgets. Anything I develop might seriously hinder the device. It should be about promoting the open source community not scaring it into moving away from it. What are we supposed to do just not use widgets? Not make phone calls? Wait for the screen to stop showing a black screen before I answer a call? Re-launch the media widget every day??

Let’s face it Nokia will not fix this issue so it’s up to us. what do you guys think?? impossible?? nothing is impossible!!

_______________My FIX – Visual representation_______________

Re: All widgets gone for no reason? home screen is unresponsive? Media player widget play button stop working? My Idea
 

Thanks for all your effort on this. So basically you're proposing process separation for all hildon-desktop widgets? I agree that should improve stability. I worry slightly that it might use a few more resources.

Re: All widgets gone for no reason? home screen is unresponsive? Media player widget play button stop working? My Idea
 

maybe someone with skills can expand on it

Re: All widgets gone for no reason? home screen is unresponsive? Media player widget play button stop working? My Idea
 

thanks, just now all my widgets are gone for no reason again, third time today. bloody hell whats going on.

Re: All widgets gone for no reason? home screen is unresponsive? Media player widget play button stop working? My Idea
 

like i said before. dont ever expect this issue to be fixed. their stance on this issue is its 'our fault'

Re: All widgets gone for no reason? home screen is unresponsive? Media player widget play button stop working? My Idea
 

In a way, it is the users fault. As soon as you venture into the wild forest that is community made software, you're running the risk of getting the blame when things break and often there are actual bugs that cause the problems.

Wanting some cool widget hot from the developers fingertips is ok as long as you, as the end user, is prepared to be a guinea pig. Sadly this is also true for some of the Nokia code...

Regarding your suggestion, I think it might be a little too costly to have separate processes, as in one per widget. Threading, on the other hand, would be much more interesting. This way, the main widget process would be able to kill threads at its leasure if need be without the added cost of having a whole new process.

Separating the different widgets from eachother is a good idea.

Re: All widgets gone for no reason? home screen is unresponsive? Media player widget play button stop working? My Idea
 

i did some googling and my idea is not new.
Read the bellow articles.
______________________________________________




1:
Programming Konfabulator Widgets
http://fb2.hu/x10/Articles/ProgrammingWidgets.html



2:
Opera Widgets for Desktop Labs release
http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog...se?startidx=50

&


Opera 10.50 features
http://mobi-planet.net/viewthread.php?tid=1870


3:
Firefox
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Fea...ng:Performance


im also sure that yahoo widgets run separate process to

Re: All widgets gone for no reason? home screen is unresponsive? Media player widget play button stop working? My Idea
 

On Linux, a process is somewhat costly to create.

However, once it's there, it doesn't really require that much more resources than a thread would. Also, how many widgets are people going to have? 10? 50? Not a big deal, just look at the amount of processes that currently runs on your N900. (ok, some of them actually are only threads)

Also, using threads would not solve the problem, since multiple threads within single process still live under same memory address space, i.e. can still trivially screw up each other.

Indeed it is not. Also, in general, adding hardware separation (yes, in most implementations, there is hardware involved with process separation, controlled by the OS) between software components has proven itself as a good idea over time.

Re: All widgets gone for no reason? home screen is unresponsive? Media player widget play button stop working? My Idea
 

As hildon-desktop is open source, I wonder what the chances are of the community implementing something like this? Would any code be needed to be changed in the widgets? If widget code had to change then that might scupper this idea, as we cannot modify closed-source Nokia widgets.

Re: All widgets gone for no reason? home screen is unresponsive? Media player widget play button stop working? My Idea
 

Haha. Not a very constructive post, I know, but this reminds me of something that happened to me last week.

I was viewing a screenshot of my desktop in the gallery, something distracted me so I put the phone down to go check it out. When I came back it had gone into standby mode, pulled the lock switch down tapped my email shortcut and...........:eek: WTF is going on here?
Tapping the screen like a demented chimp until I realised what was happening.

But anyway, back on topic.
I used to get disappearing widgets before PR1.2 and when I went to replace them the menu was full of "Cairo" stuff. Happened a couple of times after PR1.2 but discovered it was one of the widgets that was causing it. Not seen the problem since.

Re: All widgets gone for no reason? home screen is unresponsive? Media player widget play button stop working? My Idea
 

Did you file a bugreport on this? Which widget and/or what was the cause? Details (link to bug-report to start with) please.

To topic:

1. For starters
hildon-desktop has nothing to do with widgets, all widgets run within hildon-home. The difference?! hildon-desktop is everything but what you can add to your desktop, means app-starter, status-tray (don't know if the menu is extra but its def. not "home"), operator name, clock, theme, 4 desktops and all transitions that come with it. hildon-home is just what you can add to your desktop or lets call it home screen in this case, means shortcuts, bookmarks, contacts and widgets displayed on your 4 "home"-screens.

2. Explanation
What causes your widgets disappear is that they make one of the native-widgets crash-loop (afaik), this results in a fallback where all widgets are reset and only the native-widgets are loaded again.

3. Warning
A widget which causes another widget to crash while under same process may crash something else if not unloaded at that time because its not in any process structure watching it.

Just an advice from someone who suffered from the beginning:
Banning all python widgets from hildon-home and with it python-loader; hildon-home seems much more stable to me. Before I did remove all that python stuff I could set a clock by crash-time. Keep in mind that fighting symptoms will never eliminate the cause.

You mentioned the mediaplayer:
Since PR1.2 mediaplayer's play button behaves normal and as mentioned in the bugreport this is not related to hildon-home problems only, however restarting it from the unresponsive state (remove and add again from home) makes 3rd party widgets disappear what is not a must to be connected, maybe the mediaplayer widget on itself starts a crash-restart cycle as it could not connect to services and a restart of the widget engine solves it's cause which automatically results in unloading of 3rd party widgets.

Overall I think it is a really bad idea to separate/cut out hildon-home processes. A good idea is to improve debugging output instead! This would help users to file better bug-reports and provide a better testing environment to developers.

Re: All widgets gone for no reason? home screen is unresponsive? Media player widget play button stop working? My Idea
 

thanks chemist.
1:
i wasnt 100percent on how it works but you understand the point of my idea.

2:
this would only apply in a perfict world, but we dont live in one. the amount of development on the device means bugs are 100percent going to happen. nokia isnt very good at marketing and training people to do this. do you have any ideas to at least implement some sort of fail-safe so the whole system doesnt crash from a widget and only that buggy widget is affectd?? the community can do it as i dont see nokia doing it. even microsoft windows has become stable lol (god help me). imagine a widget on windows kills the whole system! i would be put off


3:
does MeeGo do the same thing???????

4:
is nokia working to fix the issue with python widgets being so unstable?????? (dont have hope on this one)

Re: All widgets gone for no reason? home screen is unresponsive? Media player widget play button stop working? My Idea
 

hi all, which widgets are pythons widgets?

The widget disappearing randomly thing only started a few days ago, when it first happened, nothing new was installed, not even updates as far as i can remember.

i just woke up one morning and all the widgets were gone.

i heard people losing their widgets when they restart, anyone else experiencing the same as me?

thanks

Re: All widgets gone for no reason? home screen is unresponsive? Media player widget play button stop working? My Idea
 

It never really crossed my mind to do a bug report, but I'm pretty certain it was the "SMS Counter Widget", because that one really went "Vettel and Webber" when I updated to PR1.2.
The widget now displays an empty grey box and doesn't appear on the screen I set it on.

Think I'll check out the bugreport, see if anything's there. But I'm not sure if the developer has given up on it as there's been no updates for it for ages.

Re: All widgets gone for no reason? home screen is unresponsive? Media player widget play button stop working? My Idea
 

These problems happen to me all the time, it needs to be dealt with. I lose all widgets when I mess with media player widget, CPU usage is high, often lags/jerky (even though I am clocked at 1000MHz), media player widget play button does nothing 99% of the time, I don't really suffer in battery life however.

Re: All widgets gone for no reason? home screen is unresponsive? Media player widget play button stop working? My Idea
 

Me too having the disappearance issue.
OK, in this case how to solve the Play button????
cos, whenever i remove the Media Player widget, many widgets disappear as well.

Re: All widgets gone for no reason? home screen is unresponsive? Media player widget play button stop working? My Idea
 

Hi guys,

I see there is severe misunderstanding in here about widgets and the stuff related to them.

I'd like to point out some general advices and good practices about this issue and widgets in general.

• hildon-home is the name of the process that runs all the widgets, not hildon-desktop
• widgets running under the hildon-home process means that if one widget is screwed up and crashes, hildon-home also goes down with it.
• In this case, it knows that it had previously crashed, but it has no idea what caused it.
• It assumes that the crash was because of a third party widget and therefore closes all third party widgets.
• Note that it does assume that built-in widgets are working good, but this may not be true for some of them.

A handy guide about how to get rid of the issue:

1. Remove all of your widgets from all of your desktops
2. Start adding them one by one. After adding each, wait some time (the time it usually takes the issue to appear)
3. If you notice that the issue re-appears, you will know which wisgets caused it
4. Please, notify the developer about his widget behaving wrong, therefore you can spare others the pain

I know, the above is already a small QA testing of the widgets.
If you don't want this issue to appear at all, you can avoid it by not installing widgets from extras-testing and extras-devel.

I think the widgets that reached Extras have gone through enough testing so they are safer. If not, help their developers by reporting them this issue.

Re: All widgets gone for no reason? home screen is unresponsive? Media player widget play button stop working? My Idea
 

It is higly unlikely, as MeeGo will not use Hildon at all.
Although I'm not aware of its architecture.

As Nokia didn't develop any of them, it is also higly unlikely.
But you can always contact the authors of these widgets (or the loader) to help them resolve this issue.

Re: All widgets gone for no reason? home screen is unresponsive? Media player widget play button stop working? My Idea
 

Hey guys,
I now this Thread is very old but I just wanted to tell how you can
fix your n900 dekstop realy easy:
1. Open X-Terminal
2. make sure you're root
3. type in: kill -1 1457 <- Ends the "hildon-desktop" process
4. type in: kill -1 1458 <- Ends the "hildon-home" process
After this your desktop should reboot(not your whole device)
and then everything is like before.

I have had this problem too...almost my entire collection of widgets disappeared and I couldn't change my desktop, but now it works just like before.

Regards,
elEnemigo

P.S. Sorry for my bad english