KDE hangs in mid-start, for my account only.
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A lot of this is copied over from a similar thread I've started on the Kubuntu forum - so far without success... This is where the guided topic thing sent me, if it should be somewhere else, feel free to move the thread...
My laptop is having a problem that is driving me nuts, and is keeping me from getting to my email and other work...  Normally I never shut down KDE, but have found that sometimes it thinks it's a Windows box and starts giving me problems that are helped by rebooting the machine. A few days ago it started getting less responsive than usual, and seemed to be running hot. The system monitor showed nearly 100% CPU busy, but I couldn't find any obvious CPU hogs so I decided to reboot... When I restarted, KDE would start and display the login screen, then after entering the username and password, it would start to open, but would hang on the flash screen between displaying the hard drive icon and the tools icon... I backed up my /home directory to an external hard disk, and reinstalled Kubuntu 12.0.4 from a USB stick, using the existing disk configuration (hoping that this would keep from disturbing my /home) Didn't change anything. I then tried logging into another existing account that had never been used - it worked fine. I also created another brand new test account, which also started up with no problem. (it is how I'm getting this message posted) This makes me think that the problem is in my /home directory... But I can't find anything wrong. Over the course of several attempts, I have tried deleting .Xauthority and .ICEauthority, and renaming every hidden file that has a modification date after the end of August to *.old, hoping that I would regenerate a clean start, allowing me to get the system running at least. (I've done this multiple times) I have also deleted the files I could find in /tmp and /var/tmp that seemed related to KDE. I also tried running chown to make sure all the files in my /home actually "belonged" to me... I think I've done all the commonly suggested fixes that usually help, and nothing has... When I am having the hang in KDE, I can still switch to the TTY's, and those allow me to log in and run console commands. If I log into one of my test accounts, KDE starts with no problems, but attempting to switch sessions to my regular account also gives the same hang on the new session. However if I switch to a TTY, and then back to the KDE / Xwindows screen (F7) I get the initial session back - it appears the hung session is started in F8? As an experiment I tried running "top" in one of the TTY's - if I'm logged into one of the test accounts, or if I'm sitting at the KDE log-in screen, I get a normal looking, ever changing list of processes. However if I've tried to log into my regular account and have gotten the hang, top shows kbuildsycoca4 as the #1 process, at 100% CPU - if I try to kill it, it just respawns... There is a hidden file .xsession-errors, in the regular account /home directory which seems to complain a lot about kbuildsycoca4 -
The test accounts also have an .xsessions-errors file in their /home, but they show a different set of error messages, and never mention kbuildsycoca4 (and the errors don't seem to be causing any problems) I'm currently totally stumped as to what I should try next - short of nuking the entire setup and restoring everything from scratch... Data on system - Kubuntu release: "Ubuntu 12.04.3 LTS" Installed directly onto the system - no Microsoft products used! KDE version: Platform Version 4.8.5 GRUB version: 0.97-29ubuntu66 No other operating systems installed Data on PC: Lenovo Thinkpad model SL500 laptop CPU: Centrino, dual core, 32 / 64 bit (32bit Kubuntu installed) CPU Family 6, Model 23, Stepping 10, 800MHz GPU: Intel Mobile 4 Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 07) 2.92 GiB RAM, 2.96GiB swap One internal HD, ATA. Model WDCWD3200BEVS-0 Rev:14.0 One Optical Drive; HL-DT-ST Model DVDRAM GSA-T50N Rev: RE05 Thanks in advance for any suggestions... ART |
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Curious. Since it works with a new user account, did you try going the inverse way -- start from a new user account, and then copy files over from the old one until it breaks? That way you can also restore all your settings piece by piece.
The kbuildsycoca4 warnings in the log file are harmless; they are just the tool complaining about non-standard-compliant desktop files. Greetings, Sven
I'm working on the KDevelop IDE.
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Registered Member
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From
viewtopic.php?f=17&t=91736 does anyone know whether
would solve this problem? Addendum: ArthurT tried this and it did not fix things.
Last edited by mgwmgw on Sun Nov 17, 2013 6:33 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Administrator
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I saw someone else who had a similar problem, which was caused by a corrupt config file. So I would do something similar to what scummos suggests:
1. First you can try to run
and see what you get. 2. From your main user's home directory, move .kde (or .kde4) to a new location. This will essentially wipe out all your configurations, but allow to keep a backup. 3. Gradually restore your configuration until it breaks.
Problem solved? Please click on "Accept this answer" below the post with the best answer to mark your topic as solved.
10 things you might want to do in KDE | Open menu with Super key | Mouse shortcuts |
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I found that my test configurations didn't like my home network, so I didn't see the last suggestions in this thread, but I did try Sven's excellent suggestion of trying to see if I could find what files from my regular account would break my test account....
This eventually solved my problem, although the solution makes almost no sense....  Using Dolphin while logged into the test account, I started copying all the hidden files and directories, a few at a time, from my broken account to the test account. I don't know why, but I got an awful lot of failures to open / read different directories / files, but most copied over OK... After each round of copying, I'd log out and log back in. Eventually I found that the .local directory from the broken account broke the test account, with the same symptoms - the KDE flash screen would hang between the hard drive and crossed tool icons, and top in a TTY would show kbuildsycoca4 stuck at 100% CPU... I then switched back to the .local directory from the test account and was able to log in just fine... I then tried to narrow the problem down further, and started repeating the process, copying individual files and subdirectories between the .local directories - with NO failures, even after I'd copied ALL the items in the bad .local to the one in the test account, except for the items that Dolphin refused to copy... After that, I logged into a TTY, did a "sudo su" to get root power, and moved the .local in the bad account to .local.old. I then tried logging into KDE with the bad account login, and it started - with the default KDE configuration, since I'd tried all the other fixes...  As part of that start up, it apparently created a new .local directory, presumably with some sort of default content. I then started Dolphin and restored all the changes I'd made to the hidden stuff other than the .local directory, including restoring my old .KDE directory. Again, I did frequent log out / log in sequences to make sure I didn't break anything new... Everything continued to work, and I got my old configuration back. Then I started copying stuff from the .local.old directory to the new .local directory, overwriting anything that existed, or copying new if it didn't already exist... Again I kept doing the log out / log in to make sure nothing broke... This went on until I had copied ALL of the .local.old content into the working .local directory! Dolphin gave me no errors, which I'm not surprised by since I was copying the files within the same account instead of across accounts like I had been when using the test account. I don't get how having a directory that caused the problem can stop causing problems just by copying it, but that seems to be the case... The only things that seem to have been impacted were that I lost the IP information for my networking stuff, and Korganizer calendar lost it's connection to my calendar data file - but both of those could have been because I'd done a reinstall of Kubuntu as part of my previous troubleshooting efforts... Bottom line - the problem is solved, but the solution doesn't make a lot of sense... ART |
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If you still have the old local.old directory, you could do something like
and see what differences you find. Maybe it's a permission issue? In any way, I'm glad that you solved the problem.
Problem solved? Please click on "Accept this answer" below the post with the best answer to mark your topic as solved.
10 things you might want to do in KDE | Open menu with Super key | Mouse shortcuts |
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Thanks Hans... I would love to see this figured out both for my own curiosity, and to help anyone else that runs into a similar problem...
I did this in a Konsole window, as a normal (non-root) user, and got the LONG response below - most of which I don't really follow. Nothing obvious pops out at me in terms of permissions, although there are lots of errors from InnoDB.... A couple things that may be accounting for some of the discrepancies - 1. Obviously I've been using the machine a lot since I got it back up. 2. The error happened on one install of Kubuntu 12.04.? - as one of my early troubleshooting efforts (mentioned previously) I downloaded the latest 12.04.3 release of the Kubuntu website and did a fresh install, skipping the partition formatting step, which I think overwrote everything except /home/* and possibly the programs I'd installed in addition to the stock Kubuntu install. While I'd been regularly updating the original installation, I don't know what differences this might have produced. Since I have solved the problem, I don't know just how much effort in investigating this is worth doing - I'm mostly just curious. If you (or any other of the forum experts) don't want to keep digging on this, I understand and am quite OK with that. Thanks again, ART
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That looks fairly okay as far as I can tell, it is mostly just Akonadi stuff.
In terms of the files it had problems copying - do you remember the names of those files?
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