No panel or menus in Plasma when user in group video

cbx550f · Last edited by cbx550f on Sun Jan 20, 2019 11:06 pm; edited 2 times in total

Edit: Was "Unable to reset KDE Plasma settings to default" - It has been narrowed down to an issue only when user is in the "video" group in /etc/group

For my primary user my KDE Plasma settings recently became messed up (no menus, no panel, etc) and I am having great trouble getting it back.

I deleted .kde4 .config .local (and actually ALL dotfiles) and the problem persisted. I then created a new user and it worked fine, which was good news, but here is where it gets odd...

After backing up all my data I did (pvint is the user in question):

userdel -r pvint
ls -ltrh /home (to verify that the user directory was gone)
rm -fR /tmp/* (just because there is something odd going on and wanted to be sure)
useradd -m pvint
passwd pvint

I can then log in with the new users and get the default workspace. Great! However... I really wanted to have this user be back on the same UID/GID to keep things consistent on external storage, so I did:

Edit /etc/passwd changing UID to 1000 (same as before)
Edit /etc/group changing GID to 1000 (same as before)
chown -R pvint:pvint /home/pvint

Logging in again I get the same corrupted desktop as before!

I have search all over for anything that might linger in /tmp, /var/tmp, /var/cache, etc. but am stumped.

Any thoughts? It's pretty odd... I know I could just leave the "new" user with the new UID/GID, but frankly I'm being a bit stubborn and need to understand this.

Note: I was planning on posting the terminal output from startx, but it got lost in the rm -fR - I will do it again and post it.
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cbx550f · Posted: Sun Jan 20, 2019 6:12 pm Post subject:

Well - I managed to figure it out! It was when I added the user to group "video" that the issue arises! (which likely is not required for the past decade or so, but you know, old habits...)

I'm guessing that this came up recently due to switching video card and changing from nouveau to nvidia video drivers. The strange thing is that it was fine for about a week (with numerous reboots) then went south.

Summary: That was really bizarre, but adding the user to group Video gave odd results in Plasma.
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I think, therefore I am wrong.

cbx550f · Posted: Sun Jan 20, 2019 6:57 pm Post subject:

Whups - not so fast... looks like I do need to be in the "video" group...
From https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/NVidia/nvidia-drivers :

cbx550f · Posted: Sun Jan 20, 2019 7:49 pm Post subject:

Some more info:

- I do not use a graphical login like xdm or sddm
- clearly repeatable that kde works with user *not* in group video but no panels or menus etc in group video (I see other reporting the same due to sddm issues, but I do not use sddm...)

Output from startx when in group video and it fails:
https://pastebin.com/Yy7URGJn

Xorg log for same:
https://pastebin.com/86sQjRNu

Other info that may be important:
From eselect profile list:
[22] default/linux/amd64/17.0/no-multilib (stable) *
(I use that profile and not desktop/plasma because I really didn't want multilib and have gone through hell trying to keep 32 bit stuff out when using the regular plasma profile)

emerge --info:

nick_gentoo · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 07 Jan 2019 Posts: 140

cbx550f

cbx550f · Posted: Mon Jan 21, 2019 2:22 am Post subject:

I know it's something stupid that I'm missing... I realized a while ago that I had DRM enabled in the kernel, so I disabled that (as noted in the wiki), rebooted to the new kernel, reinstalled nvidia-drivers and I cannot even start X (no screens found); regardless of whether my user was in group root or not. Repeated this numerous times being sure to rebuild and reinstall all modules, reboot, then rebuild nvidia-drivers, rmmod and modprobe the module, cannot start X. Ugh. The answer is likely staring at me but at this point I'm getting to frustrated to see it.

cbx550f · Posted: Fri Jan 25, 2019 1:19 am Post subject:

Well, I said "the hell with it" and started a fresh install on another partition last night - used the same kernel config and near as I can figure I did everything that is relevant to this the same, used my same home directory (so same user config), copied the xinitrc, etc., and it works fine. *shrugs*

I may investigate further, but it's hard to justify more time on this.

On the upside - the fresh install mostly went well! Other than the bindist pain there weren't really many delays. That should be documented better, IMO (but having said that, I'm not doing anything about it, so no real complaints from me on that)

I won't mark this as solved since there has not yet been a resolution. I still have the original install on another partition and I may try again.
_________________
I think, therefore I am wrong.