Hi all

I am using KDE on OpenSUSE 15, all updates are up to date.
I created a second user on a different partition. The home path of the user is not standard, I mean it does not begin with /home
When I try to login with Plasma shell the second user the screen remains black, with just the cursor visible. If I press CTR-ALT-Del the ksmserver-logout-greeter crashes and the user is logged out. Logging in with a IceWM session works fine.

In the error and messages files I can't find any useful information. I can just say the in case of successful login I have a lot of plasmashell messages, otherwise just 4 log lines, two appear also in the first case. The others say:

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plasmashell[$PID]: Mapped JIT code for
plasmashell[$PID]: "Message recipient disconnected from local bus without replying"

I'm fairly sure that the issue is related to the home path because the first user, and a test user, can login using plasma sessions with no problems.
I tried many things. Deleting and recreating the user, copying one or many configuration files from one user to the other, clearing the cache.
Eventually just one thing helped a bit, I created a symbolic link in /home to the user home and then I logged in successfully. But it lasted until I got the latest updates and restarted my PC, then the problem appeared again.

Is there a way to solve this keeping the users well separated? I mean avoiding put all the homes on the same partition.

to your last question about keeping the users' home directories on separate partitions, the answer is that you can do that and just mount the per-user partitions to /home/<user> (instead of wherever else you may be mounting them currently). When doing so, the system shouldn't care that the user's home directory is on a different partition but should work as expected due to the home directory existing in the expected path.

Workarounds exist for using other file paths involving setting certain environment variables such as $HOME to redirect to the other location. This has been discussed not too long ago on these forums.

I tried to search and I could not find the conversation mentioned by airdrik, just some issues not really closedly related, but with some more tips. I tried to create a script in: $HOME/.config/plasma-workspace/env
where I set the environment variable:

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export KDEHOME=$HOME/.kde4

But it didn't solve the issue, are there other variables I should set?

Some more information. I didn't notice before the Xorg log file. It was in ~/.local/share/sddm/Xorg-session.log
the content is:

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mprotect failed in ExecutableAllocator::makeExecutable: Permission denied
startkde: Starting up...
2019-09-28T21:09:42 Checking update-file '/usr/share/kconf_update/akregator.upd' for new updates
2019-09-28T21:09:42 Checking update-file '/usr/share/kconf_update/disable_kmix.upd' for new updates
2019-09-28T21:09:42 Checking update-file '/usr/share/kconf_update/fonts_akregator.upd' for new updates
2019-09-28T21:09:42 Checking update-file '/usr/share/kconf_update/fonts_global.upd' for new updates
2019-09-28T21:09:42 Checking update-file '/usr/share/kconf_update/fonts_global_toolbar.upd' for new updates
2019-09-28T21:09:42 Checking update-file '/usr/share/kconf_update/fonts_kate.upd' for new updates
2019-09-28T21:09:42 Checking update-file '/usr/share/kconf_update/gtkbreeze5.5.upd' for new updates
2019-09-28T21:09:42 Checking update-file '/usr/share/kconf_update/importwizard.upd' for new updates
2019-09-28T21:09:42 Checking update-file '/usr/share/kconf_update/kaddressbook.upd' for new updates
2019-09-28T21:09:42 Checking update-file '/usr/share/kconf_update/kcalcrc.upd' for new updates
2019-09-28T21:09:42 Checking update-file '/usr/share/kconf_update/kde4breeze.upd' for new updates
2019-09-28T21:09:42 Checking update-file '/usr/share/kconf_update/kgthemeprovider-migration.upd' for new updates
2019-09-28T21:09:42 Checking update-file '/usr/share/kconf_update/kleopatra.upd' for new updates
2019-09-28T21:09:42 Checking update-file '/usr/share/kconf_update/kmail.upd' for new updates
2019-09-28T21:09:42 Checking update-file '/usr/share/kconf_update/kmail2.upd' for new updates
2019-09-28T21:09:42 Checking update-file '/usr/share/kconf_update/knotes.upd' for new updates
2019-09-28T21:09:42 Checking update-file '/usr/share/kconf_update/kontact.upd' for new updates
2019-09-28T21:09:42 Checking update-file '/usr/share/kconf_update/konversation.upd' for new updates
2019-09-28T21:09:42 Checking update-file '/usr/share/kconf_update/korganizer.upd' for new updates
2019-09-28T21:09:42 Checking update-file '/usr/share/kconf_update/krdb_libpathwipe.upd' for new updates
2019-09-28T21:09:42 Checking update-file '/usr/share/kconf_update/krunnerplugins.upd' for new updates
2019-09-28T21:09:42 Checking update-file '/usr/share/kconf_update/kscreenlocker.upd' for new updates
2019-09-28T21:09:42 Checking update-file '/usr/share/kconf_update/messageviewer.upd' for new updates
2019-09-28T21:09:42 Checking update-file '/usr/share/kconf_update/okular.upd' for new updates
2019-09-28T21:09:42 Checking update-file '/usr/share/kconf_update/pimsettingexporter.upd' for new updates
2019-09-28T21:09:42 Checking update-file '/usr/share/kconf_update/sieveeditor.upd' for new updates
2019-09-28T21:09:42 Checking update-file '/usr/share/kconf_update/webengineurlinterceptoradblock.upd' for new updates
Cannot find 'org.kde.KSplash.setStage' in object /KSplash at org.kde.KSplash
Failure: Module initialization failed
mprotect failed in ExecutableAllocator::makeExecutable: Permission denied
mprotect failed in ExecutableAllocator::makeExecutable: Permission denied
OpenGL vendor string:                   X.Org
OpenGL renderer string:                 AMD CAICOS (DRM 2.50.0 / 4.12.14-lp150.12.73-default, LLVM 5.0.1)
OpenGL version string:                  3.0 Mesa 18.0.2
OpenGL shading language version string: 1.30
Driver:                                 R600G
GPU class:                              Unknown
OpenGL version:                         3.0
GLSL version:                           1.30
Mesa version:                           18.0.2
X server version:                       1.19.6
Linux kernel version:                   4.12.14
Requires strict binding:                no
GLSL shaders:                           yes
Texture NPOT support:                   yes
Virtual Machine:                        no
KCrash: Attempting to start /usr/bin/krunner from kdeinit
KCrash: Application 'krunner' crashing...
KCrash: Attempting to start /usr/lib64/libexec/drkonqi from kdeinit
KCrash: Attempting to start /usr/bin/plasmashell from kdeinit
KCrash: Application 'plasmashell' crashing...
KCrash: Attempting to start /usr/lib64/libexec/drkonqi from kdeinit
startkde: Shutting down...
klauncher: Exiting on signal 1
startkde: Done.
Unable to start Dr. Konqi
Re-raising signal for core dump handling.
Unable to start Dr. Konqi
Re-raising signal for core dump handling.


I found the cause of the issue by chance while I was working on something else.
The partition mount command in fstab had the user flag, but it was missing the exec flag. Therefore any script or program on that partition was not executable even when the umask was set as executable.
So, the issue was not caused by the path as I thought in the beginning. Just a Permission denied.

I'm glad you got that resolved.

I do want to respond to one of your earlier comments:

maxmu wrote:I tried to search and I could not find the conversation mentioned by airdrik, just some issues not really closedly related, but with some more tips. I tried to create a script in: $HOME/.config/plasma-workspace/env
where I set the environment variable:

Code: Select all

export KDEHOME=$HOME/.kde4

But it didn't solve the issue, are there other variables I should set?

$KDEHOME was dropped in KDE frameworks 5 in favor of the XDG standard environment variables, notably $XDG_CONFIG_HOME for config files (defaults to ~/.config) and $XDG_DATA_HOME for other per-user data files such as themes (defaults to ~/.local/share)