KDE is broken after upgrade

[Adrian01]

The Problem

After upgrading to Gutsy, upon launching any KDE app, I get the following dialogs:

"Could not find mime type
application/octet-stream"

and then...

"Malformed URL
file:///home/username"

All KDE apps are then unable to access any of my files, and are therefore almost useless.

What happened during the upgrade to Gutsy

I upgraded via Adept, and it failed halfway through with an error about being "unable to install" a particular package for one reason or another. In response I ran
sudo dpkg --configure -a
and then ran Adept again to complete the upgrade.

Adept began installing the remaining packages, and then again failed with the same error as before. I again ran
sudo dpkg --configure -a
but when I ran Adept to complete the upgrade it told me there were no more packages to be installed. Apt-get told me the same thing. However I was fairly sure that there were many more packages to be installed.

Possible answers?

So, is my system stuck halfway between Feisty and Gutsy? How can I verify that Gutsy has been installed? Is it just a KDE problem that can be fixed somehow?

[dibl]

Re: KDE is broken after upgrade

"Malformed URL
file:///home/username"[/i]

All KDE apps are then unable to access any of my files, and are therefore almost useless.

This much is clear -- there's one too many "/"s in that URL.

Here's what Mr. Google found on the error message:

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/...n/octet-stream

I don't think there's such a thing as "halfway between" Feisty and Gutsy. In a Konsole window, run

cat /etc/issue

and you'll get the official answer.

[Adrian01]

Re: KDE is broken after upgrade

Thanks dibl.

/etc/issue shows 7.10, so Gutsy it is.

Re the advice in the link you provided - I don't have an octet-stream.desktop located in /home/userhomedir/.kde/share/mimelnk/application, and kcontrol isn't working, so I can't use it to create one.

What should the contents of octet-stream.desktop be?

[Adrian01]

Re: KDE is broken after upgrade

I have created a file named octet-stream.desktop in /home/userhomedir/.kde/share/mimelnk/application, with the following contents:

$ cat octet-stream.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Comment=
Hidden=false
Icon=
MimeType=application/octet-stream
Patterns=
Type=MimeType

However it has done nothing to fix the problem. Here are some more examples of the problem:

If I attempt to open a web page in Konqueror, I get the error message:

Protocol not supported
http

If I attempt to open a file using Konqueror, I get the error message:

Protocol not supported
file

If I try and open my USB thumb drive in Konqueror, I get:

Protocol not supported
media

[Fintan]

Re: KDE is broken after upgrade

If you can boot into recovery mode then try this:
Move all of your email/kalander, etc stuff over to new file (/kdebackup) and delete your /home/username/.kde and restart. The new start will create a new .kde and you may be in good shape.

If that doesn't work I would not waste time and energy trying to fix a borked update.

So plan B would be to create a /Data and a /home partition (if you don't already have one) with gparted live:
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/download.php
there is also some good reading on partitioning on that link.

and move your data over to that new /Data and move your /kdebackup you created earlier to /home. Now you can just do a fresh install and point the partitions you created to /Data and /home respectively without formating.

Creating separate partitions has many virtues one of which is data security.

I hope this helps and good luck