Hi everyone,

What are the Plasma specific startup logs to look for problems in case of Plasma not starting?

When I introduce my (correct) password in the login manager the plasma session seems to start as always but it remains in a blank screen with a working mouse pointer (but it does not respond to any kind of clicking).

Except for that, the computer is working perfectly in all senses, accessible through local text consoles and SSH, with the CPU pretty idle, with all services working (even those started within the user session), etc. I can even use remotely the desktop applications perfectly from another GNU/Linux box through X and SSH.

To make it work I have to enter a real console (usually tty2, as tty1 still shows boot messages), kill Xorg process and then the login manager is automatically fired again and this second time the plasma session starts normally.

This is Debian 11 (updated from 10 where this problem begun two months ago) and it has been working perfectly as it is now literally for years, and nothing special occurred the last time I used it before the problem, which had an ordered shutdown as always.

The only other few times this happened to me was because of a full disk, and solved as easily as you can suppose. But this time that is not the case.

Any help to identify the logs to watch will be appreciated: Should it be in the X logs? Are there any specific ones to the Plasma session? I suppose these should be the more interesting but as KDE Plasma never failed to me before I don't know which they are...

Thank you in advance.

Editing to post more information about my system:
- Operating System: Debian GNU/Linux 11
- KDE Plasma Version: 5.20.5
- KDE Frameworks Version: 5.78.0
- Qt Version: 5.15.2
- Kernel Version: 5.10.0-8-amd64
- OS Type: 64-bit
- Processors: 4 × Intel® Core™ i7-7500U CPU @ 2.70GHz
- Memory: 15.6 GiB of RAM
Graphics Processor: Mesa Intel® HD Graphics 620

No one has any clue?

Hi!

You could do the following:

- check journalctl for warnings, errors
- check user permission it its homefolder
- login with a new created user and check if it behaves the same
- check your sources, old manual installed packages, pip, cargo, etc.
- try wayland instead of X or vice versa, remove .Xauthority file
- use Plasma-Debugging if you identified an applet or similar causing issues

My user xsession logs, using sddm, are in ~/.local/share/sddm/xorg-session.log.

Thank you very much, koffeinfriedhof and Section_8 for your answers.

First of all have in mind that this is a long time working computer and it still is (when I start KDE for the second time I use it perfectly well as always, without any issues) so I think some suggestions (e.g. permission checking) has not much of a point, but in any case I will check it. This comment is only for helping anyone in looking for additional clues.

I've checked journalctl before and seen nothing apparently relevant, but I'll check it again.

Strangely, the file ~/.local/share/sddm/xorg-session.log exists, but it is empty.

I'll post any advances, and be grateful for new clues.

Hi ivanvg,

Which distro are you running? This will have an effect on how Plasma is started in your case.

Do you run X11 or Wayland? If the latter there should be a second log file in ~/.local/share/sddm/ for sddm starting Wayland. If the former, check whether xorg-session.log is symlinked to /dev/null. It is on my machine; I think I did it due to it filling with repeating unimportant warnings, but it's possible it was done by something else (memory failing me etc.).

Ian

Sorry for this long delay. The distro is Debian, using X11.

After many, many tries the only certainty I got is that it was a profile problem, since a new user did not showed this behaviour. I tested deleting and copying files and folders of an empty profile, which sometimes solved the problem. At the end, the problem seems now finally isolated and resolved by deleting the folder «~/.config/plasma-workspace». This deleted folder has not been recreated in the last log-ins, so maybe it is and old configuration folder now deprecated... I don't know.

It seems a solution, but not a good explanation of the problem, since the only contents of that folder was an empty "shutdown" folder and an "env" folder who contained a symbolic link to a custom application initialization script which was created many months before the problem appeared (the script exists and worked and works flawlessly as always). Remember that the strangest thing of this issue is that Plasma has always worked, but it only did it after just killing a first failed session.

I expect this serves as a solution for someone in the future.

diem wrote:Hi ivanvg,

Which distro are you running? This will have an effect on how Plasma is started in your case.

Do you run X11 or Wayland? If the latter there should be a second log file in ~/.local/share/sddm/ for sddm starting Wayland. If the former, check whether xorg-session.log is symlinked to /dev/null. It is on my machine; I think I did it due to it filling with repeating unimportant warnings, but it's possible it was done by something else (memory failing me etc.).

Ian

Going off topic here - I think I've also had xorg-session.log grow huge, especially if I go for an extended period without rebooting or logging off my KDE user. I put my xorg-session.log under logrotate control to try and deal with this without disabling it completely.