Reinstalling/repairing KDE

[jonathan9]

I have an old notebook (HP Centrino Duo 1.66GHz) which has been running kubuntu Lucid - KDE 4.4.5 for a long time. Recently the hinge broke and took the (widescreen) display with it. Now I have it connected to an old 4:3 external monitor.

That worked fine for awhile, but, recently, KDE stopped working. When I login, it displays the splash screen. The first two icons fade into view then the next two either show up correctly or stop half faded in. The last one, the large KDE icon doesn't show up at all. After a short time, the system freezes and has to be turned off to be restarted.

The external monitor is not correctly configured until KDE starts to load, so I cannot (usually) see the grub menu or anything else before that.

What I've tried (none of which fixed it):

1) Added "text" to the grub boot options so it comes up to a text login that works. I can test the problem from there by typing startx.

2) Used apt-get to update all my packages.

3) Ran e2fsck on /home and another automounted partition and updated the bad blocks tables. (Did not run it on /).

4) Looked through dmesg, Xorg.0.log, and debug in /var/log... and nothing jumped out at me as an error

5) Logged in as another user - same thing

6) Sometimes (I'm not sure how), I can get a readable grub menu and I've tried booting with the last 3 or 4 kernels I still have installed.

7) Booted from a kubuntu lucid live CD. Comes up fine, so it's not hardware. (I still can't see anything until KDE displays the splash screen.)

I saw a post on the web where someone removed all things KDE and then installed kubuntu-desktop. I started down that route, but apt-get said it was going to uninstall a large number of packages and I didn't know how I was going to be sure I got them all back afterwards, so I didn't proceed.

I'm open to any suggestions, but think it would be good if there was a way I could uninstall KDE and then reinstall it - preferably without uninstalling all my KDE applications at the same time.

I use this notebook for everything. It has a lot of applications configured on it (lots of work - many days - to redo from scratch), so I would like to solve this without reinstalling kubuntu from scratch. /home is in its own partition and is backed up externally. The same goes for all my data, most of which is on an external drive to start with.

[SecretCode]

Not sure this will be easy ... I don't think reinstalling KDE is likely to help without a complete reinstall.

If you do decide to go for a complete reinstall, you will keep your app settings because you've got a separate /home partition, and you could save and reinstall all your apps thusly:

dpkg --get-selections > ~/dpkg-selections
# reinstall from fresh; make sure you don't lose that dpkg-selections file
sudo dpkg --set-selections < ~/dpkg-selections
sudo dselect

But there might be some things to try short of a reinstall.

If you boot into text mode and run startx I assume you get the same freeze?
Are there any messages in ~/.xsession-errors?

What is your graphics card (lspci should reveal this) and what driver are you using?

[jonathan9]

Thanks for the reply.

Yes, running startx does the same thing. In fact, that's the only way to start the gui since I added the text directive to the boot command.

Here are xsession errors and lspci output.

The xsession thing is huge. I'm sure the good stuff is at the end, but I didn't know where to chop it.

As for the dpkg method, I tried that a few years ago. The problem is that it tries to install a ton of packages that are already installed by the new install. I think it needs to be run through a diff of some sort to eliminate those. I'm sure I can figure it out.

As for a new install, I had a free partition (sda1) and I installed oneiric on it (leaving everything else intact). So far, I can't boot it though because it's like the 15th entry in the menu and the grub menu is invisble on my external monitor so I can't select it. I knew exactly what to do with grub, but with grub2, I'm a bit lost. I found a gui tool for modifying it, but with no gui ....

Thanks.

Joe

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/54584985/xsession-errors.txt

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/54584985/lspci.txt

[bra|10n]

This is just a stab, but does autokey ring any bells with you? A program you used/installed by any chance?

[jonathan9]

AutoKey

AutoKey is an amazing program that I use. It's there on purpose.

It allows you to make system wide (or restricted to particular windows) hotkeys that will do anything you can do from a keyboard. Its output looks like it's coming from the keyboard, so it works with almost everything. The hotkeys are bound to python scripts that it can record or you can write from scratch. It also does phrases that can trigger on text you write. This is good for fillinging in your email adddress, autocorrecting common mispellings, or even inserting whole boilerplates.

Check it out at https://code.google.com/p/autokey/

[SecretCode]

I see nothing in that xsessions file, though somebody else may.

To rule out the effect of config settings in your home dir, can you create a new user and boot into that user? The non-gui way to do this is using the adduser command. I don't think you need any options except for a user name, but scan the man page first.