Debian Testing {Bullseye} Problems With "startkde" and "ksmserver"
 

{{NOTE: I had a stroke in 2011, my short-term memory is "broken"}}

I prefer KDE for my default desktop, but I also use XFCE, LXDE, Fluxbox, and Icewm.

2-3 months ago, I started having a problem, (see included file)

Says "startkde: Could not start ksmserver. Check your installation."

I did a duckduckgo search but came up with nothing useful.

Question: What is startkde?
Question: What is ksmserver, and how do I start it?
Question: How do I "check the installation"?

When this appears, the only option as a logout is logout, shutdown, and reboot. BUT the only way to do any of the options are to "sudo reboot" and "sudo poweroff".

I find DDG's responses too often woeful. When DDG doesn't provide useful results, I use Google. More often I just start with Google. Sometimes I use Google's results to glean additional search terms for DDG in hopes that the referrals ultimately come from DDG instead of Google.

1. https://www.linuxtopia.org/online_bo...-sequence.html
2. https://www.linuxtopia.org/online_bo...ksmserver.html
3. I suggest to log out of Plasma, log in on one of the vttys or using some session type other than Plasma, and delete all content from ~/.cache/ before logging into Plasma again. This not unusually will solve inexplicable Plasma foibles of various kinds. One test is to create an additional user login to see whether your problems vanish using the new user. If they do, it means there is a problem with your older user's settings, possibly cache corruption or corruption of one of Plasma's many files in ~/.config/. If they don't, then you're likely experiencing a software issue rather than personal settings or cache corruption. Examination of ~/.xsession-errors if it exists may provide clues to something gone wrong.

OK, when it happens again, I will RENAME ~/cache/ to something else {hey! it's kind of big.....}

I guess that this might remedy the problem, I will call this [SOLVED]

Thank you, man, and have a good day!

There's absolutely no point to saving any cache. It's just copies of things. Programs are constantly changing what's in it, so will replace anything it's missing. Trying to restore an old cache is likely to make a mess of things. There's really no way to determine any particular portions of an old cache that might be useful. And yes, a cache can be very big.

UPDATE
 

This nonsense with "startekde" and "ksmserver" only seems to happen after I have logged into to LDXE. So, I have uninstalled LDXE to my system. Hopefully that will work.

About a week-and-a-half ago, I removed LXDE and the issue/problem has not "popped up".
Yeah.... I called it [solved] but I thought I would say the issue/problem is now really solved.

I am posting this here because this thread is one of the first that pops up when searching for "ksmserver error" and I'd like others with the same issue to find the solution I found. I dealt with this issue for years, literally, and could find no fix for it. It happened when I was doing a system restore after installing new SSD's. I restored my user directory from backups.

Fast forward I was forced recently to perform a "nuke and pave", upgrading to Debian 12/bookworm was a mistake—but that's a discussion for some other thread, and this time I didn't restore my home directory in one blow, I restored it piece by piece. I ran into an error where there was an error related to the ~/.gnupg/gpg.conf file. I restored that file and suddenly I started experiencing that startkde/ksmserver error again. So I looked at the gpg.conf file, and there was the answer.

The default key listed there didn't exist.

There is probably a way to create a proper default key and enter that into the file, but a quick workaround is to comment out the line that starts with "default-key". You can comment it out by putting a "#" in front of it.

Such a simple fix for what seems to me to be a problem that almost anyone attempting to restore their user directory would face, but 0 good information on a fix that I could find on google. I hope this helps someone.