Hey folks. I used to be able to start and stop KDE from the command line with initctl - e.g. "restart kdm". On my machine (Kubuntu 13.04, KDE 4.10.0) there no longer seems to be a kdm job (I get the message "restart: Unknown job: kdm"). Is there any way I can do this now?

Thanks!

Are you sure you are using KDM as your display manager?
Kubuntu switched to using LightDM if I recall right.

Aha, I did not know about the switch to LightDM. "restart lightdm" now does the trick for me - cheers.

Wow, solved. So I know the trick to restart KDE now restart lightdm. Thank you...

Though I'm still not sure if it's a particularly friendly way to do it. When possible, I try to at least log out of the KDE session, first. It's useful though - certain things that might require a reboot (or if something has gotten buggy) can be solved by restarting KDE in this way.

Note that if KDE appears hung, then simply logging into a VT as your ordinary user and running the following should trigger a KDE logout:

Code: Select all

export DISPLAY=:0.0
qdbus org.kde.ksmserver /KSMServer logout 0 0 0

Cool, also a very useful tip, thanks. I've always wondered what could be done with D-Bus. For any potential googlers that land here, this page is vastly illuminating: http://www.bramschoenmakers.nl/en/node/609

Hi, I have the same problem. Please a solution

"sudo restart lightdm" from any terminal should restart KDE (older versions of KDE will require "sudo restart kdm"). If you want to log off first, as bcooksley says, try the following (you have to be logged in as the same user running the KDE session):

Code: Select all

DISPLAY=:0.0 qdbus org.kde.ksmserver /KSMServer org.kde.KSMServerInterface.logout 0 0 0