Last couple of times when I (re)boot I get this message at start up:

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No command arguments supplied!
Usage: kdesudo [-u <runas>] <command>
KdeSudo will now exit...

Why does this message appear?

I recently started trying out "Activities" and in one activity I left "screen" on when logging out.
Maybe that's related - am I not supposed to leave any terminal stuff open in Activities when logging out?

don't know why, but today the message didn't appear.
I did notice that my external HDD that's always plugged in, turned itself off somehow - maybe that's related?
Anyhow, if the message doesn't reappear the next couple of days when booting, I'll simply mark this as solved...

That message should not be related in any way what so ever to your external hard disk.
If it reappears after powering on your external hard disk I would consider examining it for scripts which may be invoked during login.

What I suspect happened is that you executed a program as root (such as Apper) and did not close it when you logged out. This caused KDE to save a few details of the application (namely the kdesudo... part of the invocation) which was not sufficient to launch the application as root when you logged in again.

bcooksley wrote:That message should not be related in any way what so ever to your external hard disk.
If it reappears after powering on your external hard disk I would consider examining it for scripts which may be invoked during login.

What I suspect happened is that you executed a program as root (such as Apper) and did not close it when you logged out. This caused KDE to save a few details of the application (namely the kdesudo... part of the invocation) which was not sufficient to launch the application as root when you logged in again.

Looking in /var/log/ I find lines like the following in syslog-files. Perhaps that's a clue?

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Dec  1 09:37:54 ludo-IXLs dbus[757]: [system] Activating service name='org.kde.powerdevil.backlighthelper' (using servicehelper)
Dec  1 09:37:54 ludo-IXLs org.kde.powerdevil.backlighthelper: QDBusConnection: system D-Bus connection created before QCoreApplication. Application may misbehave.


EDIT: the message has not reappeared since 2 days, for some reason...

That is simply KDE Power Management (internally known as Powerdevil) using a "helper" application to change the brightness of the screen. On some systems with certain configurations it is necessary to write to a file which is only writable by root in order to change the screen brightness. This helper allows KDE to perform this without nasty workarounds (access to the helpers is governed by PolicyKit / PolKit and does not allow arbitrary command execution).

It is not related to the issue you experienced.

just in case someone else should have the same thing happening, a simple trick is to set the login to start with a new session - I should've thought of that before