Plasma 5 Fails to Start

alienjon · Veteran Joined: 09 Feb 2005 Posts: 1709

I had what was essentially a broken Plasma 5 install (fonts weren't displaying properly and eventually various parts of KDE would crash or weren't working appropriately). I had tried installing a qt5 only environment (-qt4 and forced all kde4 parts to not be installed). As this clearly wasn't working I cleared my packages.{keyword,mask,unmask} entries related to KDE/Plasma and followed the Plasma upgrade wiki. This led to other problems in that, despite removing any masking/keywording that would have changed things on my end, I was getting a mixture of different versions of programs within plasma/frameworks/qt that led to build errors (some kde-plasma/* were 5.4.2 and others were 5.5.4, for example). I'm sticking to a 5.5.1/5.19.0/5.5.4 environment (qt,frameworks, and plasma respectively) and now SDDM will start, however after logging in no KDE/Plasma applications load. I believe that X is running okay because Steam starts without issue (though I haven't tried playing any games to see if they will work or not). In other words, SDDM will load, but after logging in from SDDM the last SDDM draw remains on screen until Steam starts, at which point steam seems to work okay.

Despite all this I'm not exactly sure what's working or not working. After trying to log in/reboot/re-login several times I started getting KWin errors (something stating that 'KWin was unstable' while I was still in SDDM, but clicking 'OK' or 'Cancel' both led to nothing happening). None of the other errors seem directly related to what's causing the problem (the nvidia error in dmesg - see below - caught my eye, but disabling uvesafb in grub doesn't make the error go away).

Below is some system information:
emerge --info
Xorg.0.log
xdm.log
dmesg (after boot)
dmesg tail (After force closing xdm)<- The segfault/stacktrace only come up after I force-stop XDM, but I figured this was worth pointing out.

I'm wondering if this the blank screen issue a others have come across.

asturm · Developer Joined: 05 Apr 2007 Posts: 8935

BobWya · Posted: Mon Feb 29, 2016 7:00 am Post subject:

@alienjon,

Are you building your dev-qt/qt-*:5 libraries with the USE flags +egl +gles2 (noticing that you have +egl enabled globally) - that caused me a tonne of issues with the Nvidia driver (2 weeks of rebuilds / farting about)... Enabling +gles2 does disable Desktop GL support in the Qt5 libraries... I don't care if "Upstream recommends this" (cough) ... :lol:

I'd also rebuild the whole of the Plasma stack - I had black screen issues - when I just relied solely on Portage to figure out what needed to be rebuilt. In your case perhaps because there isn't a "hard" ABI / API bump from 5.4.2 to 5.5.1...

Bob
_________________
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alienjon · Veteran Joined: 09 Feb 2005 Posts: 1709

BobWya · Posted: Mon Feb 29, 2016 3:55 pm Post subject:

asturm · Developer Joined: 05 Apr 2007 Posts: 8935

Since you were following the upgrade guide - I guess you have already checked the obvious things: read through the SDDM guide, made sure the sddm user is part of video group, configured consolekit, made a sanity check of /etc/pam.d/system-login (needs nox11 parameter)...

You're not using ZFS, by chance?

You could also try without the dedicated GPU for once, disabling it in BIOS.

alienjon · Veteran Joined: 09 Feb 2005 Posts: 1709

BobWya · Posted: Tue Mar 01, 2016 7:21 am Post subject:

asturm · Developer Joined: 05 Apr 2007 Posts: 8935

It will also pollute your world file with all the frameworks and plasma packages, so please DON'T do that or add at least --oneshot (-1) to emerge.

@BobWya: Much more convenient way to do it imo:

alienjon · Veteran Joined: 09 Feb 2005 Posts: 1709

I ran genstorm's suggestion, but also ran it for kde-plasma and dev-qt.

The result was a little interesting. Some packages came up as keyworded, but already installed:
=KDE-frameworks/kf-env-3
=KDE-frameworks/kwidgetsaddons-5.19.0
=KDE-frameworks/extra-cake-modules-5.19.0
=KDE-plasma/political-KDE-agent-5.5.4

Others were still installed as the older version:
=dev-qt/qtscript-5.4.2-r1
=dev-qt/linguist-tools-5.4.2
=KDE-plasma/oxygen-fonts-5.4.3 <- I should note that this is the highest version available. There is no 5.5.*
=KDE-frameworks/oxygen-icons-4.14.3

And others still weren't keyworded, but hadn't installed (and was the wrong version):
=dev-at/qttranslations-5.4.2

I'm going to run all of these builds while I'm at work today and let you guys know how it goes when I get home. I don't know if any of the messed up packages will fix the problem (or rebuilding the others could) but I'll run the emerge while I go to work and let you guys know later {fingers crossed}

BobWya · Posted: Tue Mar 01, 2016 4:00 pm Post subject:

asturm · Developer Joined: 05 Apr 2007 Posts: 8935

BobWya · Posted: Tue Mar 01, 2016 8:26 pm Post subject:

alienjon · Veteran Joined: 09 Feb 2005 Posts: 1709

The full rebuild seems to have done the trick. I'm {finally} writing this from my Plasma environment and not my iPad (hence all the STUPID AUTO-CORRECTS). It seemed to load a bit slower than I would have expected, but I'll check the logs and see if anything else is up. Thanks so much for all the help! :-)

symon1980 · n00b Joined: 11 Jul 2010 Posts: 20

I can confirm that a rebuild did indeed fix the issue for me too. It was a fresh install funny enough... Not sure why this is an issue. I was stuck for a few days on this... Thanks guys