On 6/24/22 22:12, Felix Miata wrote:
Marc Chamberlin composed on 2022-06-24 20:22 (UTC-0700):
You second version of the magic incantation for update-alternatives does allow me to select IceWM, thank you! I don't grok what the difference is between selecting a default display manager and selecting a default xsession desktop. It feels like having these two variants is an unnecessary complication, not intuitive, and doesn't provide a user friendly method/need for selecting the type of desktop environment wanted. Anywise this is not an issue that needs to be discussed, I will accept it and move on. ... I removed everything in ~/.cache and again no joy. KDE/Plasma fails to give me a login screen at all so I cannot try using an alternate user. KDE/Plasma doesn't give anybody a login screen. That's the job of the installed and configured DM. Which DM you get is the result of:
update-alternatives --config default-displaymanager
You should rarely or never need to use this again, unless for troubleshooting, or you just want to switch from whatever you've been using.
It's on the login screen presented by the DM that a user-friendly choice among session types may be selected from a menu after logging out or booting, the same session types you see from using:
update-alternatives --config default-xsession.desktop
You should rarely or never need to use this again, unless for troubleshooting.
Once you've made your first selection of xsession type, the default will no longer be relevant, except to a new user, /or/, if you login on a vtty and use startx to try to open an X session. Hi again Felix, I am using SDDM -
nova:/home/marc #update-alternatives --config default-displaymanager There are 4 choices for the alternative default-displaymanager (providing /usr/lib/X11/displaymanagers/default-displaymanager). Selection Path Priority Status ------------------------------------------------------------ * 0 /usr/lib/X11/displaymanagers/sddm 25 auto mode 1 /usr/lib/X11/displaymanagers/console 5 manual mode 2 /usr/lib/X11/displaymanagers/lightdm 15 manual mode 3 /usr/lib/X11/displaymanagers/sddm 25 manual mode 4 /usr/lib/X11/displaymanagers/xdm 10 manual mode Press <enter> to keep the current choice[*], or type selection number:
It is necessary to open an X session as a different/new user to determine whether or not the kdeinit5 issue has anything to do with user settings. That choice should be made via the GUI login greeter, whether it's SDDM, LightDM, GDM, XDM or something else available when running update-alternatives --config default-displaymanager.
Trouble is, I am not getting far enough to see the GUI login greeter. As soon as all the start up messages finish, the screen goes black, the cursor arrow is shown, and then the xbox message pops up telling me that kdeinit5 failed to start. I can then do the CTRL-ALT-F1 trick to break out and get to a simple login prompt. I can then log in to a simple text base terminal and use text commands, but there is no GUI except for things like the ncurses version of YaST2.
SDDM is the normal DM used with KDE installations. Did you try switching with update-alternatives --config default-displaymanager to something else (e.g. LightDM) to see if Plasma would start from it?
Yes, I tried changing the DM to LightDM and others, and got the exact same error, kdeinit5 failed to start.
Do you get the same error if you boot with a 3 appended to the linu line at the Grub menu striking the E key, then login and try:marc
WINDOWMANAGER=startplasma-x11 startx
If no joy as normal user, what about as root user, or as virgin user?
No joy with this approach either Felix, but with a slightly different behavior with root and newuser. When I login with either I get a brief flash of the xbox message about kdeinit5 not starting, followed by a blank screen with a spinning circle for awhile, then back to the screen with the xbox message.
I'm out of other ideas how to troubleshoot this, and those new network/firewall issues will need a new thread to draw people with experience troubleshooting those areas. If it was me at this point, I'd restore from a good backup, or more likely, do a fresh installation, and skip up to 15.4. You might give an upgrade to 15.4 a try rather than a fresh installation.
Yeah I am beginning to think that installing 15.4, in a separate partition might be the better part of valor! That also will mean a lot of work but probably best.
Given the relative lack of interest in this thread by other people, it's probably prudent to try elsewhere, either forums.opensuse.org, or KDE forums. OK, I hear you and understand... Marc...
-- *"The Truth is out there" - Spooky* *_ _ . . . . . . _ _ . _ _ _ _ . . . . _ . . . . _ _ . _ _ _ . . . . _ _ . _ . . _ . _ _ _ _ . _ . _ . _ . _ . * Computers: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the user Marc. His mission: to explore strange new hardware. To seek out new software and new applications. To boldly go where no Marc has gone before! (/This email is digitally signed and the OpenPGP electronic signature is added as an attachment. If you know how, you can use my public key to prove this email indeed came from me and has not been modified in transit. My public key, which can be used for sending encrypted email to me also, can be found at - https://keys.openpgp.org/search?q=marc@marcchamberlin.com or just ask me for it and I will send it to you as an attachment. If you don't understand all this geek speak, no worries, just ignore this explanation and ignore the OpenPGP signature key attached to this email (it will look like gibberish if you open it) and/or ask me to explain it further if you like./)