Problem after upgrading 4.2 Resolved!

[seikishi]

I'm pretty new to Kubuntu and Linux in general. This is the first computer I've installed it on. I tried following all the directions to upgrade to 4.2, but now that whenever I boot my computer, I get to the login screen and login, but after that all I get is a black screen with a mouse arrow I can move around. Is it possible my computer might be a little too old? Or did I mess something up installing it? Any help would be appreciated.

[arochester]

Re: Problem after upgrading 4.2

This is the first computer I've installed it on. I tried following all the directions to upgrade to 4.2

Did you ever get a GUI or have you only had text? What are the basic system specs of the computer - particularly how much RAM (memory) has it got?

[seikishi]

Re: Problem after upgrading 4.2

The computer's got a
Pentium 4 3.0
1 GB RAM
Nvidia GeForce 7600GS

All I get when I boot my computer is the GUI for the login screen and everything that's there, and I can boot in terminal mode, but after logging in, all I get is a mouse arrow that I can move around the screen, nothing else.

[fermier]

Re: Problem after upgrading 4.2

I'm pretty new to Kubuntu and Linux in general. This is the first computer I've installed it on. I tried following all the directions to upgrade to 4.2, but now that whenever I boot my computer, I get to the login screen and login, but after that all I get is a black screen with a mouse arrow I can move around. Is it possible my computer might be a little too old? Or did I mess something up installing it? Any help would be appreciated.

Well, I suspect that there is nothing wrong with your system, since I have exactly the same problem and in my case KDE 4.1.4 was working perfectly. When you have the mouse pointer, which in my case I can move around, seems to imply that the X session is open and is not hanging. No driver and hardware problems. In my case I can end the session (alt backspace) and then I have the login screen again. I can even go to a normal terminal session (used this to try and resolve my package problems, which I thought I did since I had no more error messages afterwards when I did an apt-get upgrade). I do know that during the upgrade from 4.1.4 to 4.2 there were package incompatibilities even though I followed exactly the procedure as spelled out here: http://www.kubuntu.org/news/kde-4.2. All plasmoids were removed and all plasma files in the .kde/share/config directory were removed before I attempted the upgrade. Sad thing is that now I cannot return to 4.1.4 which worked quite well (teaches me once more not to touch things that work!!!). The problem is that I do not see or find any error messages that could point me in the right direction and the upgrade went so fast that it was not possible to see what the exact incompatibilities between packages were. I think I sit with a partial install and maybe you as well. I think we can both benefit from the gurus with some ideas of what we can look for as a way to solve our problem. At least now I know I am not alone.

I was thinking if one could completely purge the system of ALL KDE packages and files and attempt the installation of 4.2 again this may resolve the problem. I only guess. I do not seem to find the one magic package that would ensure its deinstallation would result in a complete purge of all of KDE.

l8r

[Nate]

Re: Problem after upgrading 4.2

It could be that plasma is not loaded. If I quit plasma without logging out I get a black screen as well. Does Alt-F2 work? If so type 'plasma' after pressing Alt-F2 and what happens?

If plasma is broken you could try to reinstall it using Adept or Synaptic or you could delete your plasmarc and plasma-appletsrc files which are in ~/.kde/share/config.

[quarkslot]

Re: Problem after upgrading 4.2

You need to disable desktop effects, reboot your PC, login, run all the updates and then you should be fine:

At the black screen follow these steps:

- switch to a login shell (Ctrl-Alt-F1)
- change to your config directory: cd ~/.kde/share/config
- edit the file kwinrc as root using your favourite editor, in the [Compositing] section change Enabled=true to read false
- quit and save changes
- reboot (shutdown -r now)

That should bring back your screen.

[flying_icarus]

Re: Problem after upgrading 4.2

Let me add my advice to the discussion:

You should try what quarkslot said, although you do not need administrative privileges to edit your own files.

And one more thing, it's easier doing things in graphics mode when you're just starting out, so you can install an additional desktop enviroment for such emergencies. One of the lightweight ones should be fine for this, for instance fluxbox or icewm.

So you could for instance:
1) switch to a login shell (press together Ctrl and Alt and F1 as quarkslot said)
2) login with your credentials
3) install i.e. icewm by typing the following: sudo apt-get install icewm and press enter
4) go back to the login manager by pressing together Alt and F7 (or maybe F8)
5) restart the login manager from the menu or by presing together Alt and e
6) select icewm from the session menu in the logim manager (right now you have kde selected)
7) login with your credentials

Now you should have a lightweight and minimal GUI, and it is enough for you to be able to run kate as text editor or some other configuration program that you may need/want, firefox, etc. If you cannot find it in the menus (everything should be there in programs->applications) you can run it by starting an x-term and typing the application name (i.e. dolphin or konqueror), then confirming with enter.

If anything goes wrong with effects and drivers, this should work as it does not use 3D capabilities.

So back to the problem at hand, if disabling efects by editing ~/.kde/share/config/kwinrc does not work out, you can try the other thing, renaming your ~/.kde folder to something else (i.e. ~/.kde_backup) while you're in the icewm enviroment, and then log out and back into KDE.

This will force KDE to regenerate all settings and may fix the problem, but now your settings (and bookmarks, kontact accounts etc) will not be applied since they are in the ~/.kde_backup directory.
From here on forwards the best advice I can give you is copy what you think you need from ~/.kde_backup to ~/.kde (overwriting the autogenerated stuff). Some of the files you will need to copy while kde is not running as they are saved when exiting, but config files for i.e. kmail and such should be safe to copy arround as long as kmail or whichever app is in question is not running.

So.. good luck, hopefully this will not happen again, but also hopefully you'll have learned how to get out of a tricky situation.

[flying_icarus]

Re: Problem after upgrading 4.2

Oh, and also advice for fermier:

If you want to "reverse" the 4.2 upgrade, it can be done but you will also probbably want to be either in text mode or another GUI apart from KDE.

So, the idea is to remove the package repositories which contain 4.2 packages, remove all of KDE, and then reinstall KDE with only the default package repositories in /etc/apt/sources.list Remember, this is only if your system-wide installation is somehow incompatible with your system, otherwise if your personal settings are causing problems then it's easier to start with a fresh ~/.kde

The first part is easy, open /etc/apt/sources.list with your editor and remove the repositories you added, or if you used adept then do the opposite to remove the repositories.
Then refresh the package lists:

sudo apt-get update

Now on to removing kde 4.2 how would you do this? ... you could try listing all packages with kde in their name with the following console command:

dpkg -l | grep 'ii.*4\.2\.0.*ppa'

This assumes that all installed kde packages have 4.2.0 and also ppa in their version string. It *may* pick up some other packages, check the output or redirect it to file for further study (by appending > to_check.txt at the end of the command)
So what then? Let's isolate just the package names, type:

dpkg -l | grep 'ii.*4\.2\.0.*ppa' | awk '{print $2}'

Ok... so that's what we need to remove, hopefully nothing less and not much more. Keep your fingers crossed and do this outside KDE (and even possibly test it out in a virtual machine first)

sudo dpkg -l | grep 'ii.*4\.2\.0.*ppa' | awk '{print "dpkg --force-all --purge "$2}' | sh

If it breaks just run it again untill it stops breaking... or if it is insistent try reading dpkg output to see why it won't remove a package, try doing what it wants.

After the deed is done, time to reinstall:

apt-get install kubuntu-desktop

If apt-get nags about unresolved dependencies or conflicting versions, it may be because something was left from 4.2 and it is not letting our regular 4.1.x packages install. But aptitude should be able to help us out, just try again with

aptitude install kubuntu-desktop

and it should offer you solutions to do what you want, one after another (the first one is not necessarily the best one)

Unfortunately this is not an elegant way to do it, but it is "risky", "living on the edge" and it makes you feel like a mega-hacker when it (usually) works out in the end.

Did I mention the benefits of having /home on a separate partition when reinstallation is necessary?

Good luck, have fun and don't do this stuff if you don't have an afternoon to spend on fixing it if it goes wrong.

[fermier]

Re: Problem after upgrading 4.2

It could be that plasma is not loaded. If I quit plasma without logging out I get a black screen as well. Does Alt-F2 work? If so type 'plasma' after pressing Alt-F2 and what happens?

If plasma is broken you could try to reinstall it using Adept or Synaptic or you could delete your plasmarc and plasma-appletsrc files which are in ~/.kde/share/config.

Thanks everybody for all your advice. Of all the advice the above was probably the most useful as this identified 5 more packages that were not installed and were not even reported by apt as missing. Once these were installed I now have a graphical interface again. It has become clear to me that MANY other packages must also be missing. as things like rather spartan on the menu list. Very strange that the update could go so wrong.

Thanks again to everybody who replied. Since I did not start this post I cannot change the posting as resolved, but my problem certainly is now resolved. The remainder of the packages I would surely find myself. Pity that there is not one single package (aside from kubuntu-desktop) that one would invoke such as kdebase and then all the other necessary parts would automatically be installed.

l8r

[jetwiz]

Re: Problem after upgrading 4.2

Not sure if you first require uninstalling 4.10, before installin the new 'upgraded' version. Can anyone answer this?
Also, I am also new to the forum, can anyone tell tell me where is the 'new post' button? Is the small 'pm' button the answer?

[flying_icarus]

Re: Problem after upgrading 4.2

jetwiz:

in this instance there is no need to uninstall 4.1.x, the upgrade actually works by looking at all packages you currently have installed (4.1.x as well as tons of other stuff) and then looking at the repositories for anything with the same name but higher version number (once you add the repository containint packages with version 4.2 that's what it will find). This makes it easy to upgrade but tricky to downgrade.

So if you were to uninstall 4.1.0 and press "upgrade" in adept, or enter "apt-get upgrade" in a prompt nothing much would happen (you wouldn't get 4.2 because there would be nothing to upgrade from).

However, after adding the repository with 4.2 packages you can upgrade or select the "kubuntu-desktop" package for installation and both should get you the same results - kde 4.2

Installing kubuntu-desktop will force the installation of all other packages which kubuntu-desktop says it needs, and then those other packages will pull installation of their dependencies and so on. That's the way you end up with a couple of hundred megabytes of packages with one "apt-get install kubuntu-desktop" and kde 4.2, regardless if you had it before or not.

[jetwiz]

Re: Problem after upgrading 4.2

great. thank you .. will then proceed then with the upgrade to 4.2 w/o uninstalling 4.10

However, before starting install, can someone first tell me if there is a red flag of such proportion in the new 4.2 release that t is recommended to wait till a 4.2 patch is needed ??

[seikishi]

Re: Problem after upgrading 4.2

Well I added icewm and I was able to edit the kwinrc file, but for some reason on the login screen I can't login using KDE. The session type list only has Default (which runs iceWM when I try it), iceWM, and Failsafe. It's possible KDE was never listed before because all I ever used was the Default. It's the regular Kubuntu login screen that I had before though.

[flying_icarus]

Re: Problem after upgrading 4.2

Seikishi, this is an interesting problem, but I think we may be able to solve it for you.

Entries in the session menu are stored as files in the directory "/usr/share/xsessions" and the one we need is a file called "kde.desktop"

So, my quess is that the package which should have installed this file is missing or didn't install correctly. The package can be found out like this (type this in a terminal, possibly it can be also found with synaptic)

dpkg-query -S "/usr/share/xsessions/kde.desktop"

The output is

kdebase-workspace-data: /usr/share/xsessions/kde.desktop

so the package name is kdebase-workspace-data.
then let's try reinstalling it:

apt-get install --reinstall kdebase-workspace-data

While you're at it, why not reinstall this as well:

apt-get install --reinstall kdebase-workspace-bin

If that doesn't fix the problem (the kde entry doesn't appear in the session menu of the login manager) then we could try forcibly removing it, with

dpkg --purge kdebase-workspace-data

and then put it back with

apt-get install kdebase-workspace-data

and also check if the package manager thinks that all required kde packages are installed:

apt-get install kubuntu-desktop

This all should fix the problem with high probbability.

[seikishi]

Re: Problem after upgrading 4.2

Yep, that fixed everything. Thank you very much!