Hi everyone,

What are the Plasma specific startup logs to look for problems in case of Plasma not starting?

When I introduce my (correct) password in the login manager the plasma session seems to start as always but it remains in a blank screen with a working mouse pointer (but it does not respond to any kind of clicking).

Except for that, the computer is working perfectly in all senses, accessible through local text consoles and SSH, with the CPU pretty idle, with all services working (even those started within the user session), etc. I can even use remotely the desktop applications perfectly from another GNU/Linux box through X and SSH.

This is Debian stable and it has been working perfectly as it is now literally for months, and nothing special occurred the last time I used it, which had an ordered shutdown as always.

The only other few times this happened to me was because of a full disk, and solved as easily as you can suppose. But this time that is not the case.

Any help to identify the logs to watch will be appreciated: Should it be in the X logs? Are there any specific ones to the Plasma session? I suppose these should be the more interesting but as KDE Plasma never failed to me I don't know which they are...

Thank you in advance.

This counts the number of times "plasma" (or "Plasma"/"PLASMA"/etc) occurs in files within the /var/log directory, removing the instances where that number is zero:

1 members found this post helpful.

Thank you for your interesting answer, boughtonp, but I've discovered only a few complaints of colord daemon, which in fact existed before the problem occurred.

Any more clues? Is there any kind of "main plasma session configuration file" that I could try to remove to "reset" the plasma for this user?

On X11 check ~/.xsession-errors, don't know about wayland though.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thank you for your reply. I've read "~/.xsession-errors" (which was 428 MB long!) and I've not seen nothing apparently bad.

This is very strange.

Anyway I've installed the LXQT Desktop Environment in parallel, so at least I can use the computer while I manage to fix KDE Plasma.

You can use the same technique to identify potentially interesting config files, e.g: "grep -rci 'plasma' ~/.config/ | grep -v ':0$'".

That returns a variety of results here, some might be relevant, but I have no idea whether renaming any of those files will help or hinder - maybe checking whether any have a recent modification date might give a clue as to whether something was changed?


Backup/rotate that file so you've got an empty one, then logout and back in to see if anything new appears?

1 members found this post helpful.

Well, finally I could not find any clue in any log file, so I don't really know what happened, but I could solve the problem deleting (making a backup just in case...) the folder "~/.kde" of my user.

Everything works again and apparently nothing has changed, although that is a configurations file folder for KDE and its default applications, so expect some configuration reset if you follow this advice (although I haven't noticed any by now).

Regards.

Run a tool like Meld to compare the old folder and new folder and highlight the differences - that'll allow you to restore any changes you wanted and potentially identify any oddities that might have caused it.

Nice idea!

I've compared the contents of the old .kde with those of the new one, in which there has only been recreated two files. The only interesting differences are that in the newer file "kdeglobals" do not appear these values:

[$Version]
update_info=kded.upd:kde3.0,kdeui.upd:kde4/migrate_from_kde3_icon_theme
[General]
XftAntialias=true
XftHintStyle=hintmedium
XftSubPixel=none

So they must be the problematic ones. The first seems a good candidate... although I have not made any KDE update recently.

Maybe this helps someone else.

Forget my last message, the problem is not solved.

It's even stranger now (or maybe this happened before too): the first time I login in Plasma the problem is still the same, but if then I kill Xorg then I can login normally into Plasma...

If you haven't already, search the KDE Plasma issue tracker to see if anyone else has the same issue - and if not it's probably something to raise one for.

After many, many tries the only certainty I got is that it was a profile problem, since a new user did not showed this behaviour. I tested deleting and copying files and folders of an empty profile, which sometimes solved the problem. At the end, the problem seems now finally isolated and resolved by deleting the folder «~/.config/plasma-workspace». This deleted folder has not been recreated in the last log-ins, so maybe it is and old configuration folder now deprecated... I don't know.

It seems a solution, but not a good explanation of the problem, since the only contents of that folder was an empty "shutdown" folder and an "env" folder who contained a symbolic link to a custom application initialization script which was created many months before the problem appeared (the script exists and worked and works flawlessly as always). Remember that the strangest thing of this issue is that Plasma has always worked, but it only did it after killing a first failed session.

I expect this serves as a solution for someone in the future.

What did the developers of KDE Plasma say?

(You know, the ones with intimate knowledge of all its config folders, current and previous, and who might even be able to provide an actual fix, not a workaround, if they are told about the problem.)