After happilly spending over a year with DT on Windows, I have decided to give it a try on Linux. Being a novice to Linux, it is quite probable that I am making some mistakes…
My problem is that DT is working fine on my Linux Fedora 33 until I try to export to jpg. After 1min of exporting (which is a normal time on my PC) the DT is closed and there is no jpg file exported. When I launch the DT again “the RAW file is unavailable” even though it is there. Only when I open it with “Open with Darktable”, it is seen in DT again. Still, the same behavious is observed when trying to export to jpg again.
Any ideas what I could be doing wrong?
What kind of information do you need? It is a default export (the only change to the default is in fact 100% jpg quality, all the other export parameters are the same). The RAW is edited using Filmic, Denoise profiled, Haze removal, tone equalizer, local contrast, etc. No problems with exporting the same file (with exactly same modules) on Windows.
Thank you all for your feedback. If you really recommend openSUSE, I am seriously thinking about changing. Why do you think that it is the best distribution for DT?
Darex is more skilled than I guiding you in this case.
Best distro for dt? Actually, it is a matter taste; the one you like!
Presently, I favour Manjaro/Gnome. Before that Manjaro/KDE.
Search the forum for distro fever
I suppose the best distro is the one used by whoever is advising you (or they would have changed). So that is clearly openSUSE
Now, to get back to the problem. Does darktable give any information when started from a command line with debugging enabled:
> darktable -d all > dt_debug.txt
(that might be too much, not quite sure which options would be the most useful though) . The redirection is to write all the info to a file ‘debug.txt’, for later study.
I wouldn’t be surprised if @darix’ suggestion doesn’t work: e.g. a default openSUSE install doesn’t dump core on crash, nor does it have coredumpctl installed.
I had some time to play: I fetched Fedora 33 and ran it as a live USB. Then I installed darktable (dnf install) onto the USB stick, opened a RAW file (a .RAF in my case) in darktable and finally I exported it as a .JPG set to 100%.
It worked just fine.
You said that 1 minute export time is normal time on your computer. This makes me wonder about your setup:
CPU?
Motherboard?
Graphics card?
What if you remove your present darktable installation, reboot, and then install darktable again?
I am sure that there is a simple explanation/remedy to all this; the problem is just to find the culprit…
I’m using Leap 15.2 with KDE atm, and systemd-coredump was not installed by default (same as the tools to go with it). And I didn’t do anything special to avoid installing it either. Strangely, gdb was installed by default, so indeed, the missing coredump facilities may well be a bug
And tbh, that doesn’t surprise me all that much. How many current users would know what a coredump is, let alone what to do with it? (20 years ago, it was a different story, seems the efforts to get Linux into the mainstream have had some effect…)
I just type on a TW install. systemd-coredump is not installed.
The install is from beginning of November. I chose minimum installation and than chose my KDE Plasma packages in the custom package selection during installation.
Two Leap 15.2 machines, one end of Nov, installed the same way as above and one recent install from last week, chose Plasma Desktop scheme at installation,
also did not install the package.
Sorry for keeping bothering you, but I still cannot find a solution.
Removing, rebooting, reinstalling did not help. When launching DT from a shell, the only messsage that I get when exporting is “Terminated” and the DT is … terminated, but no file is stored.
There is also nothing particular in the debugging file:
It is true that my PC is pretty old:
i5-480M 2.66
3G RAM
Radeon HD 6550M
Still, it should not be the reason for the crash. I was hoping that when using Linux and only Darktable, it could still be useful.
This might be the cause of your problems. To convey an impression : having worked with dt for about half an hour, htop shows the following usage of memory (only dt !) :
RES (physical memory) 1.613 GB SHR (shared memory) 172 MB
VIR (virtual memory) 13.3 GB
And I have some experience working with a nine year old system with only 4 GB of ram where I observe crashes from time to time which I have never seen on a new system equipped with 64 GB of ram.
Thank you for your replies. They were really helpful, especially the hints about my RAM and about swap. It turned out that insufficient memory was the main reason for the crash. I added an appropriate swap file (the default swap partition in Fedora 33 was too small) and now DT exports the files as it should. The time of the export is not great (2min) but at least it works.
