I need some help here. I recently did one of my regular upgrades and now KDE won't start.

The upgrade showed no problems, but immediately after that KDE started to show a lot of instability, with apps crashing unpredictably. So tried logging out and in again. Well, X started up fine and I got the gdm login manager, but when I entered my password KDE refused to restart. I just got a blank screen for a minute and then kicked me back to the login screen. Rebooting didn't help either. I had to boot into icewm in order to type this.

I'm at a total loss here. I don't know where to begin to fix this or even diagnose the problem. Where should I start?

Can anyone help me?


Oh, and while we're working on it, does anyone know how to speed up the mouse cursor movement in icewm? It's so slow it's driving me nuts.

Update: Well, it seems that KDE will still run for the root user. It's only my normal user account that doesn't work. I suppose I should try creating a new user account and see what happens then.

There are a few log files you can check:

.xsession-errors (in your home directory)
Anything recently changed in /var/log
KDE also writes some stuff in /tmp/kde-<yourusername>/

I recall a similar problem when upgrading KDE in Debian. I think it was a directory permission problems somewhere, but I don't recall exactly.

Thank you. I had forgotten about .xsession-errors. I did check /var/log, but I didn't find anything that seemed imprtant. /tmp/kde-david only had a link to /var/tmp/kdecache-david/ksyscoca, which seems to be an unrelated data file.

.xsession-errors has this though:
I looked at the privileges for kdeinit and anything connecting to it that I could find, but they all seemed ok; read and execute are set for all the files and directories I could find.

I'm not sure about the "suid" errors. I don't think they're directly related to the startup problem. I also saw similar errors for gtk+ in the various logs I looked at. But I'm wondering if it has something to do with the fact that I can't launch anything from the icewm menu. I'm having to run everything from a console right now.

So where do I go from here? What am I missing?

Well, some progress. I've discovered I can log into a failsafe terminal and run startkde and it works. But for some reason my regular scim input engine has been replaced by skim, the KDE version of it. I wouldn't mind except that it's non-functional.

Besides, I still can't log in straight from gdm.

I also thought that it might have something to do with upgrading xorg. I still had one package, x11-common, that I hadn't upgraded because there were other packages depending on it. But since they were all non-essential I decided to go through with it anyway. No effect. But I think I might be able to work around it by running dpkg-configure and setting it so that "anybody" can connect to the server. That might let me bypass whatever's blocking me. I'm going to try that next. But it would be a temporary workaround in any case, since it's not a wise setting securitywise.

Whoops. My mistake. x11-common only lets you decide who gets to start the x-server, not who gets to connect to it. I guess I'm still stuck.

I've searched all over the net, but every entry I've found has been old, unrelated, or without solution. Where could the holdup be?

Have you tried using kdm as display manager? Seems to be set in /etc/X11/default-display-manager. Or you can put a line /bin/false in there and start it by hand. Log in as root and do 'exec kdm'.

Hard to keep track of posts on here at the moment - search function does not seem to be working correctly.

Yeah, I'm considering it. I don't have it installed right now, but of course that can be remedied easily. I was thinking about testing it first with xdm, since that's already available to me.

Still, I much prefer gdm, and I want to get it working again if I can. I'm trying to learn just how it goes from login to WM session. There seem to be so many different startup files all linked together and multiple ways to do the same thing, that I'm rather confused by it all.

Problem solved. Just not by me. A new update of gdm came out and everything's working again. Y'know, I was starting to think it might be a gdm bug, since everything else seemed to work ok.

Thanks for your help everyone. It may have been a lot of effort for nothing, but at least I learned about how some things work, and I also learned some things about icewm and changing my mouse properties in it, in case I ever have to go through this again.

Onwards and upwards!