kde desktop broken after update

[daneel]

This morning (April 8th) the kdm desktop manager stopped working. I'm running this in twm hoping that a dist-upgrade to feisty will fix the problem.

When I start a new desktop after rebooting all I get is the background bitmap with no menus or toolbars and no way of starting any programs.

Were there any recent upgrades to the X packages or kde packages?

I see this at the end of kdm.log...

AUDIT: Sun Apr 8 09:28:15 2007: 4243 X: client 12 rejected from local host

which sounds like some kind of security warning.

[cantab]

Re: kde desktop broken after update

Check your disc space (with df -h in a terminal), such problems are common if you've let one of the filesystems fill up (in my case, usually /home)

[daneel]

Re: kde desktop broken after update

Oodles of room. 11% of 45 G on / and 39% of 139 G on /home.

I tried installing the gnome desktop and that works perfectly. Well, I say perfectly. All the apps are messed up because the home ~/.kde folders aren't being used.

But at least it starts gdm. Unlike kdm which seems to break at the drop of a hat.

[claydoh]

Re: kde desktop broken after update

If there is a bad/corrupted file or folder, or the file/folder permissions have changed, you can try two things:
try renaming your ~/.kde dir after killing/stopping KDM and log back in:

mv ~/.kde ~/kde-orig

If you are in a gnome desktop, you can rename it from the nautilus file manager, and not have to use a terminal. If that works after logging back in to KDE, you can retrieve any important files (email, kopete settings, etc) from your ~/kde-orig folder

You can also make sure that .kde/ and other files in ~ have the correct ownership. If you are again in a Gnome desktop, you can easily check this in nautilus. The ownership should be your username for both User and Group
if not:

sudo chown -Rv <your-username>.<your username> /home/<your-username>

Usually, if there is a file permission/ownership issue, you would see an error message when trying to log in, so i am thinking it the first method might be the one to try. If it does not work, you can delete your new ~/.kde and rename the orig back:

 rm -rf ~/.kde && mv ~/kde-orig ~/.kde

You won't have it fixed, but everything will be back in its place

[daneel]

Re: kde desktop broken after update

Thanks - that fixed it. I've ferried my email across by importing the folders in kmail.

This seems to happen too often with KDE. I've installed gnome too, as that seems to be more robust.