I'm pulling my hair out over this one. Normally, I start KDE from the shell with the root user by just launching kdm. Nothing in KDE starts anymore because ktimezoned can't connect to DBus.

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Loading extension XINERAMA
klauncher(3149) kdemain: No DBUS session-bus found. Check if you have started the DBUS server.
kdeinit4: Communication error with launcher. Exiting!
kdmgreet(3136)/kdecore (K*TimeZone*): KSystemTimeZones: ktimezoned initialize() D-Bus call failed:  "Not connected to D-Bus server"

kdmgreet(3136)/kdecore (K*TimeZone*): No time zone information obtained from ktimezoned
kdmgreet: Fatal IO error: client killed


I've scoured the internet for weeks and I still can't figure this one out because from everything I can tell, both system and session DBus should be running, but for some reason it still doesn't work. The screen goes black and kdm looks like it's going to start and then it dies.

> Fatal IO error: client killed

a) X11 crashed
b) kscreen removed all monitors

can you
a) check /var/log/Xorg.0.log for errors, backtraces etc.?
b) move away (rename) ~/.kde/share/apps/kscreen (might be ../kde4/...) and see what happens

a) There's nothing suspicious in the X log file. X itself runs fine. I can run startx, xdm or xfce4 without any problems. The issue is only with KDE.

b) ~/.kde/share/apps/kscreen doesn't exist. The kde4 directory exists, but I don't have any files named kscreen anywhere underneath ~/.

Hmm, it seems more likely that ksmserver (what would keep the session up) goes down.

Can you try to run "ksmserver" from some "failsafe" login (ie. xterm only session) and see what happens (whether it exits w/ an error or crashes etc.)?

Okay... so I started X and ran ksmserver from xterm. Plasma crashed the first time I ran it, but after that, it appears that it runs without crashing. I can move windows around but the panel that I had before is gone and I can't add a new one. None of the menu items on the "New Activity" applet (e.g. "Add Panel" work.

Also, I can run startkde by specifying it in ~/.xinitrc, but all of the panels and menus are black.