[PLASMA 5] kwin seg fault - can't run live disk

[vandamme]

Been trying to get anything with KDE to run. 2019 version of Neon, Manjaro, Kubuntu 18.10, even openSuSE of 5 years ago. It loads then about the time I expect to see the desktop -----goes BLACK. I can log out and get a error message kwin_x11 segmentation fault. Then, have to hard reboot. I tried the nomodeset at boot. (All ISOs work on other machines.)

Ten year old eMachine with 3.6 GB ram, Athlon II, NVidia GeForce 6150SE. It runs Ubuntu 18.10 MATE and Mint 18.1 Cinnamon fine.

[oshunluvr]

Not really much to go on here except the obvious - a ten year old cheap computer is bound to be difficult to get a new distro on, but anyway...

There are dozens of possible causes for what you're seeing - google "black screen kde" and you'll see. This is usually a graphics problem, especially with a 10 year old graphics card.

Likely, kscreen is not setting the monitor correctly. When you have the black screen, does "Alt F2" produce the krunner menu? When at the black screen, does CTRL-ATL-F2 bring you to a terminal log in?

[jlittle]

Ten year old eMachine with 3.6 GB ram, Athlon II, NVidia GeForce 6150SE

I ran a desktop with that CPU and graphics chip, or something similar, for 10 years or so, till it died. For it the magic step was to install with nomodeset in force, then boot with nomodeset, from 12.04 on. By 14.04 I'd forgotten what I'd done two years previously, and had to curse, tear hair, etc. before I got it going again.

When plasma/KDE 5 arrived kwin would crash a lot, but I could restart it from a Linux console and limped along that way. You might give that a try: press ctrl-alt-f2, log in, run

$ export DISPLAY=:0
$ kwin_x11

Regards, John Little