Notices

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.

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)

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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