Unable to get a working desktop (KDE)

DKMR · n00b Joined: 03 Jan 2018 Posts: 3

This is my first experience with Gentoo so I apologize if I forgot to mention something important. I followed the handbook installation and everything went smooth, I chose the KDE Desktop profile during the installation. With a bit of digging I kinda set up everything except the damn desktop.

It was a painful fight to get this far, first I was having issues with base packages missing but I had plasma-meta installed. Fixed it magically today by updating the system (haven't touched the laptop since I installed everything 2 months ago). Then I had a black screen with the cursor (the themed one mind you, not the standard X11 cursor) and the CPU fan was going nuts. XSM was missing for some reason so I got that (x11-apps/xsm).

Now the wallpaper is shown, the hamburger menu in the top left corner, and the cursor is there as well, however the bottom taskbar is not showing and clicking the mouse anywhere doesn't do anything. The fan is still going crazy, looking at "top" I see dbus-daemon on top with 25-26% CPU usage, below is the kded5 and klauncher with some minor usage (5-7%) and below that is nothing siginificant in terms of resource drain.

Pressing the power button shows the shutdown menu which kinda works - except "Shut down" brings me back to the greeter and the fan calms down as dbus-daemon is no longer molesting the poor CPU.
Also, I modified the plasma.desktop file in /usr/share/xsession so the Exec parameter has --failsafe at the end, and kwinrc has OpenGLIsUnsafe set to true - these two things were responsible for going from a black background to displaying a wallpaper and the hamburger menu.

I have the Nouveau driver loaded for now, the GPU is GeForce Go 7200, CPU is Core2Duo T7700, the system has 4GB of RAM.

I'd really like to start using this system daily and having a GUI is a must since I'll use LibreOffice and Firefox most of the time.

Thanks for any suggestions, and once again I apologize if I forgot to mention something important!

asturm · Developer Joined: 05 Apr 2007 Posts: 8936

DKMR · n00b Joined: 03 Jan 2018 Posts: 3

asturm · Developer Joined: 05 Apr 2007 Posts: 8936

Why bother opening a support thread, then? It's not like you had to wait too long for a response here. Would have been interesting to find out your problem, anyway.

DKMR · n00b Joined: 03 Jan 2018 Posts: 3

asturm · Developer Joined: 05 Apr 2007 Posts: 8936

That's fine; I'm sure many people here do not run with their first, or even second try of a Gentoo install.