Recently on my KDE 4.10 Fedora 19 system the shutdown and logout menu items have stopped working. They just dont do anything and I have as yet found no error messages to suggest why. I have SELinux disabled so that is unlikely to be involved. This started to happen after a recent update but to be honest I am not sure exactly which update it was. The system continues to run normally and I can use 'Run Command...' to issue a shutdown now and that works immediately. I have searched the forum and found others with similar symptoms but they all seem to have other issues as well which I dont have. Also things like 'Lock Screen' work fine.

Can anyone please suggest a cause for this or point me at where to look for a possible error which might help debug this?

Stuart

Which login manager are you using? KDM, GDM, LightDM?
Also, by "shutdown now" are you referring to the command "shutdown -h now"?

Sorry should have said KDM and yes that was the shutdown command.

I've just created a test user and managed to switch by using Lock Screen and then Switch User to logon to this test user. This test user CAN get the Shutdown/logout/Restart menu items to respond with the correct pop allowing confirmation. So it would seem it must be something in my main user somewhere which is causing this but I've no idea what.

Stuart

Hmm. Does the below command elicit any response from KDE when executed in the session of the user which is not working properly?

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qdbus org.kde.ksmserver /KSMServer logout 0 0 0

That command gives no output at all running in konsole as my user. If I do an su and then run the command I get

Could not connect to D-Bus server: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NoReply: Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken.

Stuart

It was expected to give no output - however the desktop should have reacted and begun the logout sequence.
Is there an application running in the background which could be suppressing the logout / shutdown sequence? Applications such as text editors, word processors, etc can all do this.

There is nothing I can see, only things running are the usual stuff in the task bar like klipper kmix network device notifier etc. Looked through what ksysguard shows and cannot find any applications etc or editors. I certainly have not started anything which has not terminated.

Stuart

Please enable all debugging areas using kdebugdialog, then attempt to initiate a logout.
Then check ~/.xsession-errors for the string "canceled shutdown" - this should indicate which application is potentially preventing logout or shutdown.

I enabled all debug options but there is nothing in .xsession-errors which says cancelled shutdown.

Stuart

Odd. Just to verify nothing was jammed, can you logout and log back in, then try the procedure again?

Well having disabled everything in autostart except plasma and krunner I can now get a response from the menu items. I'll do some more testing to see what of the items stops the menu shutdown working and report back.

Stuart

Well this is strange, I have now put back all the autostart programs I had before and the problem has not returned, all those menu items now respond as they should. The only other thing I did was to turn off the option to login my user automatically at boot, but I've put that back as well now and still the menu items respond OK. So my problem has, at least for now, gone away.

Stuart

Interesting. Good to see it is solved. If the issue occurs again, don't hesitate to post back so we can continue to investigate.

Well it's not solved, the problem is intermittent. Happened again this morning. This time nothing autostarted when I booted up, not even stuff like kmix. I have tested again with all debug options set and nothing shows in xsession-errors as before relating to shutdown failing. All the items which failed to autostart, some are set to autostart in setup and others because they are running on shutdown, started OK manually. The only things which do not work are the logout/restart/shutdown menu items once again.

Stuart

The failure of some applications to startup is quite relevant here - they likely failed to start because the necessary phase of the login process where they would be started was never reached.

Next time that occurs, please have a look to see if any processes are hanging off KSMServer, which are "stuck" and have not forked themselves off for some reason. Shell scripts are particularly prone to engaging in this behaviour if placed in the relevant autostart directories.