[SOLVED] Unable to start KDE

Dippmopser · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 22 Jun 2013 Posts: 92

Hello,

as the title implies, for some reason I cannot start KDE.

I followed the guide, that can be found here:

http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/KDE

The Doctor · Moderator Joined: 27 Jul 2010 Posts: 2678

Point zero: you should absolutely never ever run X as root!
Create a normal user. Aside from security concerns, there is a fair amount of software that will not work as root.

Startkde should be enough to get a working, if minimal, KDE. Consolekit is not required for a basic GUI. There is no need to worry about it.

First, lets narrow the problem space. Try testing X. The easiest way is to use the command X -retro & sleep 5; killall X This will give you a test screen on a white and black background with a large black X cursor. The remaining commands will wait 5 seconds and then return you to the terminal by killing the X server. If that fails, please pastbin your xorg log. You can use wgetpaste. You may need to emerge it. The way you use it is to wgetpaste /var/log/Xorg.0.log and post the url returned.
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Dippmopser · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 22 Jun 2013 Posts: 92

Hello,

the command you provided, did exactly what you described, where do I go from here?

...

Yes I read that working as root is not recommanded, since I am setting up gentoo on an older machine just for testing proposes and to get to know the system, I did not give it much thought, since no real work will ever be done with that machine anyways.

EDIT:

I created a normal user and ran startx again...
now I get the following:

/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc: linie 59: twn: command not found
/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc: linie 63: exec: xterm: command not found
/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc: linie 60: xclock: command not found

The Doctor · Moderator Joined: 27 Jul 2010 Posts: 2678

Try typing startkde in the terminal. If that fails, there should be a binary in /usr/bin called startkde or similar. I can't remember exactly what it was called. If you can't find it, it probably failed to install. This would be a problem and we will need to see logs of the failed packages.

EDIT: those errors are normal. They refer to the default X window manager which naturally you haven't installed. You will need to edit the user's .xinitrc for startx to look for KDE.
_________________
First things first, but not necessarily in that order.

Apologies if I take a while to respond. I'm currently working on the dematerialization circuit for my blue box.

Dippmopser · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 22 Jun 2013 Posts: 92

startkde does not work (command not found)

In /usr/bin, there is no startkde the only file starting with "start" is "startx"

emerging "kde-base/kdebase-startkde" gave me no error msgs whatsoever.

How do I edit the user's .xintrc to look for KDE? Where can this be found and what do I have to insert?

The Doctor · Moderator Joined: 27 Jul 2010 Posts: 2678

Now I am a bit confused. I believe that .xinitrc should contain

imaginasys · Posted: Wed Jun 26, 2013 4:59 am Post subject:

KDE4 has a different place than KDE3 for startkde . You should use the full path with the name.

Find where is startkde : $ which startkde

Should be in "/usr/local/bin/startkde"

and try to put : /usr/local/bin/startkde in your .xinitrc (or whatever the path is).

or try it on a command line : xinit /usr/local/bin/startkde

The package kdemeta contains startkde. The package startkde is just a bare bone kde with no application at all.

Regards,
BT :mrgreen:

VoidMage · Watchman Joined: 14 Oct 2006 Posts: 6196

Dippmopser · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 22 Jun 2013 Posts: 92

The output of wgetpaste (as suggested by "The Doctor"), can be found here:

http://bpaste.net/show/109935/

What imaginasys suggested did not work

albright · Posted: Wed Jun 26, 2013 12:34 pm Post subject:

if startkde is not in /usr/bin then your system
is hosed (or you actually don't have kde installed)

do you have eix installed?

If so what is the output of

eix -I kde
_________________
.... there is nothing - absolutely nothing - half so much worth
doing as simply messing about with Linux ...
(apologies to Kenneth Graeme)

Ahenobarbi · Posted: Wed Jun 26, 2013 1:26 pm Post subject:

Dippmopser · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 22 Jun 2013 Posts: 92

albright · Posted: Wed Jun 26, 2013 6:00 pm Post subject:

your eix output show you have only kde-env installed;
you should have a very large number of kde packages

I would suggest trying to re-emerge kde-meta and post
the output
_________________
.... there is nothing - absolutely nothing - half so much worth
doing as simply messing about with Linux ...
(apologies to Kenneth Graeme)

The Doctor · Moderator Joined: 27 Jul 2010 Posts: 2678

Clearly, something is failing to emerge because you are missing base packages that the meta package would pull.

Perhaps it would be worth your time to install fluxbox and xterm just to get a working GUI and make it easier to read portage's output. The [ebuild N ] in the output indicates that it has not been installed. Startkde is a dependency of kdebase-meta so it should have been installed either way.
_________________
First things first, but not necessarily in that order.

Apologies if I take a while to respond. I'm currently working on the dematerialization circuit for my blue box.

Dippmopser · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 22 Jun 2013 Posts: 92

OK, what I am doing now is

Ahenobarbi · Posted: Wed Jun 26, 2013 9:46 pm Post subject:

emerge fails, there is a problem when emerging boost

Dippmopser · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 22 Jun 2013 Posts: 92

Sure, here you go:

http://bpaste.net/show/110091/

EDIT:

I installed fluxbox according to this guide:

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/fluxbox-config.xml

Now I get a desktop, however the emerging slim, as suggested, requieres this boost-thingy and emerging that fails again.

VoidMage · Watchman Joined: 14 Oct 2006 Posts: 6196

Well, it might be not enough disk space, but far more likely is that '-j3' combined with 1GB total RAM is simply not enough for boost.

Dippmopser · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 22 Jun 2013 Posts: 92

Could you go into a little more detail?

According to the Gentoo-Handbook the jX-Setting depends on the number of processors or provessor cores that is.

So with a Dual-Core CPU I set it to j3, how is that setting affected by the amount of RAM?

However I can surely reduce this to j1 to be on the save side or do you thank that 1GB RAM is generally not enough to run boost?

The Doctor · Moderator Joined: 27 Jul 2010 Posts: 2678

The jX setting says run X parallel jobs using X times more ram. Under normal conditions, this isn't a problem and can actually speed up the emerge. However, if you run out of memory then you just can't go any farther and the build fails. You can override this on a one time basis by using MAKEOPTS="-j1" emerge -1 boost Keep in mind that most computers have 3-4 times more ram than your box does.

You should be able to start fluxbox with startfluxbox or modify startx to do it. Slim isn't required for fluxbox to run.

However, this does raise a point worth considering. I don't know if 1Gig of ram is enough for KDE. The lowest I ever had was 2 Gigs a few years ago.
_________________
First things first, but not necessarily in that order.

Apologies if I take a while to respond. I'm currently working on the dematerialization circuit for my blue box.

Dippmopser · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 22 Jun 2013 Posts: 92

1GB should be enough since I ran kubuntu a week ago on the same hardware.

albright · Posted: Fri Jun 28, 2013 12:00 pm Post subject:

the issue is not memory to RUN boost but
how much memory needed to COMPILE boost
_________________
.... there is nothing - absolutely nothing - half so much worth
doing as simply messing about with Linux ...
(apologies to Kenneth Graeme)

Dippmopser · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 22 Jun 2013 Posts: 92

Hello again,

I re-emerged the kde meta package.

When I now type "startkde", I get the message: