Can't launch any programs until I kill kate

[marek_online]

This is a weird one, and affects two machines that I have Quantal installed on.

The machines boot and auto-login as normal, then go through post-login setting up of the session. About halfway into this things just stop working - apps won't launch, kde is generally unresponsive.

Thankfully, yakuake starts up before this happens, so that I can hit F12 and "killall kate". As soon as I do this, I get an error message that says KDE could not start /usr/bin/kate (though that file does exist and works normally after), and all the programs that hadn't launched up to now suddenly appear. Everything then works perfectly until the next login, when I have to stop the kate process again.

A few details that might be relevant:
- kate isn't in the Autostart or startup configuration.
- I've tried adding a "stopkate" script (just !/bin/bash; killall kate) in .kde/Autostart) but this doesn't help.
- I don't use kate much at all, so I've no idea why it would have got stuck in whatever session file KDE is using.
- I've tried manually saving the session, after killing kate, but to no avail.

Any pointers would be much appreciated.

[Snowhog]

K Menu > System Settings > Startup & Shutdown > Session Management > On Login and check Start with an empty session.

[marek_online]

K Menu > System Settings > Startup & Shutdown > Session Management > On Login and check Start with an empty session.

Thanks, but no joy.

Not sure if this tells us anything, but having started with an empty session it meant that I didn't have yakuake to stop kate. I shifted into another session with Ctrl-Alt-F6, logged in from the command line and was able to kill kate from there. Shifting back to kde and everything was working.

[sealbhach]

Maybe something in your /home config files is causing this? Try deleting anything to do with kate in .kde/share.

[marek_online]

Deleted things, to no avail.

But it seems unlikely to be the kate config files. I can launch kate fine except for this at-login problem (the error is KDEinit could not /usr/bin/kate).

I tried adding kate and /usr/bin/kate to the list of applications to be excluded from sessions. No dice.

[james147]

Does the same thing happen for a newly created user?

[marek_online]

It's fixed.

Not sure what did it. The last thing I remember doing was fixing ownership on the metainfo file in .kde/share/apps/kate (it was owned by root). There was an X related software update too though, and it's not just fixed on the original machine, but on the laptop it was happening too as well.

Either way, everything's working smoothly now. Thanks for your help.

[oshunluvr]

I suggest in the future when you need to do something as root using a GUI program, use "kdesudo" in lieu of "sudo" or use the rootactions servicemenu options. This should prevent problems like this.

[kubicle]

The last thing I remember doing was fixing ownership on the metainfo file in .kde/share/apps/kate (it was owned by root).

One thing that can cause that is running kate with sudo (that's why is better to run kate or any GUI applications with kdesudo rather than sudo). I don't know whether you are in a habit of using sudo with kate or not, but I thought I'd mention that just in case you were wondering what could be causing ownership changes. (EDIT: I see oshunluvr already brought this up)

The ownership change could explain why kate freezes, but kate shouldn't run at all when starting an empty session...do you autostart anything during login that could invoke a kate process?