Hi!

First of all sorry if this sub-forum isn't the correct place for this post.

I have the following problem with KDE on my computer at work. After a power loss, something went wrong and KDE acts strangely. Dolphin starts very slow and when I tried opening some sections of 'Configure Desktop' I get a message that says: cannot communicate with KDED. Also the Plasma shell became quite unstable.

I tried deleting the .kde folder and even tried deleting all hidden folders inside the home directory of my user.

The version of KDE is pretty old, 4.4, unfortunately it's not up to me to upgrade and I'm stuck with it.

So thanks for reading, hopefully you guys could suggest some solution to this problem.

with KDE not running clear your KDE cache folder /var/tmp/kdecache-user_name then start KDE and run

Code: Select all

kbuildsycoca4 --noincremental

if you create a new user same problems?

Thanks for the answer. Unfortunately it didn't solve the problem.
I wouldn't be able to create a new account as I'm not the admin of the pc, and since I asked them to install KDE as an additional environment it's not likely they would consider it essential to fix. So I was hoping for a simple solution.

rename your home folder ~/

what is the exact error message you get regarding kded?

if you disable composting (desktop effect) with alt+shift+f12 is plasma stable?

is the default folder Dolphin opens a local drive? samba ? or NFS?

if you run systemsettings (configure desktop) in Konsole are there addition error messages

was the system doing an update when it lost power?

Hi!
Can I rename my home folder? I thought I have no permission to do this. What would be the result?

The exact message I get in system settings is 'unable to contact kded'. Compositing is disabled and the starting folder in dolphin is the home directory on a local drive.

I opened system settings from konsole but didn't see anything useful there, however I did that in a non-kde session because as of right now KDE wouldn't allow me to log out or restart the system, so I avoid logging in a KDE session. And something else which is interesting is that dolphin starts and works perfectly outside of KDE as well as gwenview, konsole and probably others apps.
And finally about the state of the system while it lost power, well just regular work - a few opened documents, a browser and no updates or anything like that running.

Thanks!

if you can't log into KDE you might wish to start a new thread. after you try logging in can you look @ ~/.xsession-errors to see if there's any clues. what exactly happens when you try and login?

kded4 is a daemon that should be running, can you tell if it's running using ksysguard or the command "pgrep kded4" there should be 2 numbers in the result, one pid for you and one for root - if not try starting it with "kded4 --new-startup "

renaming your ~/ is not feasible as you don't have rights to create a new on

do you have a ~/.kde4 folder? if so rename it and try logging in again

you can also look at this thread viewtopic.php?f=66&t=89113

Hi again!

Logging in isn't a problem. But logging out and restarting the pc don't work. As soon as I click log out plasma loads the dialog box but doesn't log out and it stops responding. Another interesting thing is that krunner (alt+f2) doesn't work at all. KDED is running when checking in the system monitor. As for the .kde folder - I deleted it as well as the other hidden folders a few times.

I asked the support at work to reinstall the KDE packages but it didn't fix the situation. I guess it's a temporary file or some configuration file which is broken, but I have no further idea.

Well thanks again!

Does this work under a new user?