No Plasma + no window borders == :'( [now fixed]

[DeathKitten]

Hey everyone!

I've been enjoying KDE4 for a couple weeks now, even managed to find a plasma theme that wasn't horrendous to look at despite no one seeming to design anything that's friendly to panels being on the side of the screen. (I really need to make time to learn how to make my own plasma theme, really.) I've been pretty happy with it, until I did an update in adept manager this morning. Now plasma doesn't seem to load at all, and window decorations are missing in both KDE4 and KDE3. At least kicker still works fine, so I can at least fake my way through being functional without having to fall back to the live CD. Anyone have any ideas on how I might be able to fix this?

Also, I'm not sure what details would be useful to provide. I'm running hardy heron, and as of no more than a hour ago, I should be as up to date as possible. I can post my source lists if that might be helpful, but I don't think I have anything outside of the defaults, other than the repository for the kde4 stuff, and medibuntu.

Any thoughts, suggestions or fixes very much welcome. I haven't seen anything else come up on the forums yet about this, but sometimes my google-fu and search-fu are weak, so I may have missed something. Thanks in advance.

[Fintan]

Re: No Plasma + no window borders ==

Hmm.... As fa as plasma is concerned something similar happened to me when upgrading from kde4 to kde4.1. I think the reason was that the .kde4 folder that was generated for kde4 doesn't always like kde4.1.

I renamed .kde4 to .kde4.old from within kde3 (or recovery mode / live cd) and re logged in. This will generate a new .kde4 folder that is compatible.

You will have to reconfigure (redecorate) your desktop and copy over all your kontact, konqueror, etc settings from old to new.

I don't know why your window deco for both kde4 and kde3 should be affected.
Maybe kde3.5.10 is the culprit and you will have to follow the above procedure for .kde3

Hope this helps and say hi to California for me

[DeathKitten]

Re: No Plasma + no window borders ==

I'l give that a go in a minute here, but I suspect the window decoration problem still originates with the kde4, because I'm seeing desktop transitions and effects that look like they came from kde4. I'll try backing up and recreating the kde4 folder first, and if I'm still left borderless, I'll give the kde3 folder the same treatment.

First is morning LJ, email and web comic reading. I'll report back on the results shortly though. Thanks.

[DeathKitten]

Re: No Plasma + no window borders ==

Well, it's something else wrong with the plasma, as that didn't make one bit of a difference. Maybe I'm diagnosing wrong... I'm getting nothing but white background and my cursor when I load up. Before I renamed the KDE4 folder, programs I'd had open before were opening again (Pidgin and Firefox) but without borders.

Thoughts?

I'm going to see if Adept Manager has anything to offer in the way of updates while waiting to hear back from you guys. Thanks!

[DeathKitten]

Re: No Plasma + no window borders ==

Okay, further googling finally yielded a suggestion for the kde4 issue. If all else fails, uninstall and reinstall, yes? That fixed the plasma problem. I'm back in kde4 happily again.

And apparently the problem with the window borders? I'd tried enabling desktop effects a while back, and they didn't seem to cause any problems, but when I tried disabling them again, the window borders came back. Yeah, don't expect me to explain that one, but everything's working again.