Hi,
Since the most recent upgrade (Archlinux) KDE won't load beyond the splash screen (Nvidia; Intel on another workstation is not affected). Would have been small fry, if it had not been for the auto login enabled. Login screen is never presented, so I can't select an alternate DE. Any ideas?

Please provide the content of ~/.xsession-errors so we can investigate why KDE won't load.

In terms of disabling automatic login, I would suggest looking for "kdmrc" under /etc and editing that - it will likely contain those settings.

bcooksley wrote:Please provide the content of ~/.xsession-errors so we can investigate why KDE won't load.

In terms of disabling automatic login, I would suggest looking for "kdmrc" under /etc and editing that - it will likely contain those settings.

1. Unfortunately, I've got nothing suggestive of .xsession-errors

2. /usr/share/config/kdm/kdmrc?

# Enable automatic login. USE WITH EXTREME CARE!
# Default is false
AutoLoginEnable=false

(It's on the Intel box.)

Llama wrote:

bcooksley wrote:2. /usr/share/config/kdm/kdmrc?

# Enable automatic login. USE WITH EXTREME CARE!
# Default is false
AutoLoginEnable=false

(It's on the Intel box.)

Yes that should do the trick.

Thanks!

My network connection turned out to be down, which looks like the real trouble underneath. AutoLoginEnable is a useful piece of knowledge, nonetheless.

Solved

When the system is hanging during (Auto-)Login, you can press Ctrl+Alt+Backspace _twice_ to kill the current X session (provided that feature is not disabled in X's configuration).
You should then get back to the login screen (and could f.e. choose a different session there) even when Auto-Login is enabled.

Rather unusual - down network connections shouldn't disrupt a KDE login.
As for why ~/.xsession-errors is missing, you'll need to ask your distribution about their equivalent if startup problems occur again.

bcooksley wrote:Rather unusual - down network connections shouldn't disrupt a KDE login.

It has not been disrupted, after all. Just snubbed for several minutes.

bcooksley wrote:Rather unusual - down network connections shouldn't disrupt a KDE login.

I know of at least one case where this does happen:
The "Remember The Milk" plasmoid just hangs if the server is not reachable, it won't even recover when the network status changes.
So if you have that plasmoid on your desktop or panel, this will cause plasma to hang on login (without any desktop to appear) when there's no Internet connection.

There are open bugreports about this:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=315414
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=322431
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=254275

As for why ~/.xsession-errors is missing, you'll need to ask your distribution about their equivalent if startup problems occur again.

At least on openSUSE, this is now ~/.xsession-errors-:0 (replace '0' with the number of the X display).