Pidgin Security Update Killed KDE

MQMan · 08-20-2009, 11:27 AM

Hi. I'm running Slack 12.2, with the last KDE 4.2 packages that Pat made available, that were built to run on 12.2. Until today, everything was running fine. I have a local KDE session running, and I use either TightVNC or, very rarely, the NoMachine NX client to connect remotely, to a second session.

This morning, I connected, via TightVNC, and applied the security upgrade to pidgin, that was just released. During this upgrade, the background go my KDE session suddenly turned white, and I also lost the toolbar.

As I was unable to do anything with the session, at that point, I killed the TightVNV session, and restarted it. When I logged back in, all I get is a black screen. Nothing else.

I then removed the pidgin package, and tried again. Same result. I also tried to connect using NX. I saw the initialising dialog, and got the 1st 4 icons. Following that, if I clicked anywhere on the screen, it just went black. Again, no background, and no toolbar.

My local session appears to be running OK still, but I'm afraid to shut it down, in case I lose that as well.

Looking in the TightVNC log file, I see the following errors, which I think are the issue:

Code:

...
kded(4822): Communication problem with  "kded" , it probably crashed.
Error message was:  "org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NoReply" : " "Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken." "
...
plasma(4837): Communication problem with  "plasma" , it probably crashed.
Error message was:  "org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NoReply" : " "Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken." "
...

<unknown program name>(4868)/: Communication problem with  "kaccess" , it probably crashed.
Error message was:  "org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NoReply" : " "Message did not receive a reply (timeout by message bus)" "
...
etc. for other KDE applications
...

I've tried starting TighVNC both "normally", and with dbus-launch, but both give the same errors.

Any ideas why the pidgin update would cause this, and more importantly, how do I fix it.

Cheers.

rworkman · 08-20-2009, 11:42 AM

Impossible - I just looked at the pidgin package contents to make sure there wasn't a problem with it, and there doesn't appear to be. I believe this is going to be one of those annoying things known as a coincidence.

That being said, this sounds more like the dbus daemon has crashed or is suddenly rejecting messages on the buses. Try the windows solution (reboot), but poke around and make sure there's not filesystem corruption or something along those lines first - you don't want to take down a system like that, because you might not be able to bring it back up at all.

MQMan · 08-20-2009, 12:51 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by rworkman

Impossible - I just looked at the pidgin package contents to make sure there wasn't a problem with it, and there doesn't appear to be. I believe this is going to be one of those annoying things known as a coincidence.

A mighty big coincidence. Plasma, or at least I think it was, crashed at the exact moment the new version of pidgin was installed.

Quote:

Originally Posted by rworkman

That being said, this sounds more like the dbus daemon has crashed or is suddenly rejecting messages on the buses.

Is there any way to check this. As I said, my local KDE appears to be still running OK. But that's hard to check right now, as I'm not at home.

Quote:

Originally Posted by rworkman

but poke around and make sure there's not filesystem corruption or something along those lines first

I would have thought that would have manifested itself in others ways as well.

Quote:

Originally Posted by rworkman

because you might not be able to bring it back up at all.

That's what I'm afraid of.

Cheers.

MQMan · 08-20-2009, 01:37 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by rworkman

That being said, this sounds more like the dbus daemon has crashed or is suddenly rejecting messages on the buses.

Is it possible that removing a pidgin library, which has registered with dbus might cause this.

Cheers.

rworkman · 08-20-2009, 02:04 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by MQMan

Is it possible that removing a pidgin library, which has registered with dbus might cause this.

Nah. Check to see if dbus-daemon is still running; if so, that's not the problem anyway.

Perhaps all of kde just went out to lunch for whatever reason. Try creating a new user account and see if kde works fine there. If it does, then I suspect something in $HOME/.kde/ got corrupted along the way (no idea how though).

MQMan · 08-20-2009, 02:23 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by rworkman

Nah. Check to see if dbus-daemon is still running; if so, that's not the problem anyway.

Loads of 'em. One with --system, the rest --fork and --session.

Quote:

Originally Posted by rworkman

Perhaps all of kde just went out to lunch for whatever reason. Try creating a new user account and see if kde works fine there. If it does, then I suspect something in $HOME/.kde/ got corrupted along the way (no idea how though).

Nope. Went to another user, who had never run X or KDE previously. I get exactly the same errors there, when starting KDE, via TightVNC.

Cheers.

rworkman · 08-25-2009, 03:23 PM

Sorry, I'm at a loss here. Nobody else has reported anything even remotely similar, so I stand by my original statement that the pidgin upgrade was unrelated though. What about some other desktop environment or window manager - do they work properly?