On Saturday, 19 July 2025 23:32:02 British Summer Time Philip Webb wrote:
> 250719 Michael wrote:
> > On Saturday, 19 July 2025 01:20:48 British Summer Time Philip Webb wrote:
> >> A few weeks ago, a weekly update resulted in KDE failing to start ;
> >> as it needed to be updated anyway, I have been using Fluxbox instead.
> >> During the past few days, I removed all the old KDE pkgs,
> >> did an update of all the Qt pkgs which were installed
> >> & re-installed all the previous KDE pkgs in their new versions,
> >> so that I now have Qt 5.15.17 + 6.9.1 , KDE Frameworks 6.13.0 ,
> >> Plasma 6.3.5 + Apps 25.04.2 .
> >
> > A simple update would not normally break a DE.
> > Did you run --depclean and were any packages removed ?
>
> No & No, but I might not have remerged some non-KDE file which was relevant.
> However in that case, Portage should have listed it as a requirement.
> >> I use OpenRC with 'startx' + '.xinitrc' :
> >> for Fluxbox, the latter is simply 'startfluxbox' ,
> >> for KDE, it's 'exec dbus-launch --exit-with-session startplasma-x11',
> >> which worked with the old version of KDE & is recommended in Gentoo Wiki.
> >> Now when I enter 'startx', I get a black screen + a movable
> >> mouse-pointer,
> >> but nothing else, & have to restart the machine & return to Fluxbox.
> >
> > You should be able to exit the X session by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Backspace.
>
> That doesn't work.
>
> > you could try Ctrl+Alt+F2 to go to a VT
> > from which you can interrogate the logs, stop the hanging X session, etc.
>
> That does work & avoids physically restarting the machine.
> I tried to stop the X session via 'htop', but couldn't find the basic
> process.
> >> There is an error msg : "$DISPLAY is not set or can't connect to server".
> >
> > Where did you find the above error message ?
> > Can you check /var/log/Xorg.0.log
> > to see what it reports before you restart the PC ?
>
> The system hasn't generated 'Xorg.0.log' since July 2023,
> when I was still testing the machine.
>
> However, I did check all the logs bearing today's date
> & found something useful : at the very end of 'syslog' it says :
> "dbus-daemon ... Activated service 'org.kde.Ksplash' failed :
> Process org.kde.Ksplash exited with status 1".
>
> The output ( 92 K lines ) from 'strace', about half-way down, reports :
>
> 13324 newfstatat(AT_FDCWD,
> "/usr/share/dbus-1/services/org.kde.KSplash.service",
> {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=86, ...}, 0) = 0 13324 newfstatat(AT_FDCWD,
> "/usr/share/dbus-1/services/org.xfce.Tumbler.Manager1.service",
> {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=124, ...}, 0) = 0 13324 openat(AT_FDCWD,
> "/usr/share/dbus-1/services/org.xfce.Tumbler.Manager1.service", O_RDONLY) =
> 8 13324 fstat(8, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=124, ...}) = 0
> 13324 read(8, "[D-BUS Service]\nName=org.freedes"..., 124) = 124
> 13324 close(8)
The above refers to xfce a different desktop environment.
> Further down it reports :
>
> 13322 access("/home/purslow/.config/ksplashrc", F_OK) = 0
> 13322 readlink("/home", 0x7ffc1c146b30, 1023) = -1 EINVAL (Invalid argument)
> 13322 readlink("/home/purslow", 0x7ffc1c146b30, 1023) = -1 EINVAL (Invalid
> argument) 13322 readlink("/home/purslow/.config", 0x7ffc1c146b30, 1023) =
> -1 EINVAL (Invalid argument) 13322
> readlink("/home/purslow/.config/ksplashrc", 0x7ffc1c146b30, 1023) = -1
> EINVAL (Invalid argument) 13322 access("/home/purslow/.config/ksplashrc",
> F_OK) = 0
> 13322 access("/home/purslow/.config/ksplashrc", W_OK) = 0
>
> The content of 'ksplashrc' is '[KSplash] \ Theme=org.kde.oxygen'
>
> After a few lines re 'kdeglobals', it goes on :
>
> 13322 statx(AT_FDCWD, "/home/purslow/.config/ksplashrc",
> AT_STATX_SYNC_AS_STAT|AT_NO_AUTOMOUNT, STATX_ALL,
> {stx_mask=STATX_ALL|STATX_MNT_ID, stx_attributes=0, stx_mode=S_IFREG|0600,
> stx_size=31, ...}) =\ 0
> 13322 statx(AT_FDCWD, "/etc/xdg/ksplashrc",
> AT_STATX_SYNC_AS_STAT|AT_NO_AUTOMOUNT, STATX_ALL, 0x7ffc1c147f50) = -1
> ENOENT (No such file or directory) 13322 readlink("/home", 0x7ffc1c146b50,
> 1023) = -1 EINVAL (Invalid argument) 13322 readlink("/home/purslow",
> 0x7ffc1c146b50, 1023) = -1 EINVAL (Invalid argument) 13322
> readlink("/home/purslow/.config", 0x7ffc1c146b50, 1023) = -1 EINVAL
> (Invalid argument) 13322 readlink("/home/purslow/.config/ksplashrc",
> 0x7ffc1c146b50, 1023) = -1 EINVAL (Invalid argument) 13322 openat(AT_FDCWD,
> "/home/purslow/.config/ksplashrc", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = 5 13322 statx(5,
> "", AT_STATX_SYNC_AS_STAT|AT_NO_AUTOMOUNT|AT_EMPTY_PATH, STATX_ALL,
> {stx_mask=STATX_ALL|STATX_MNT_ID, stx_attributes=0, stx_mode=S_IFREG|0600,
> stx_size=31, ...}) = 0 13322 statx(5, "",
> AT_STATX_SYNC_AS_STAT|AT_NO_AUTOMOUNT|AT_EMPTY_PATH, STATX_ALL,
> {stx_mask=STATX_ALL|STATX_MNT_ID, stx_attributes=0, stx_mode=S_IFREG|0600,
> stx_size=31, ...}) = 0 13322 statx(5, "",
> AT_STATX_SYNC_AS_STAT|AT_NO_AUTOMOUNT|AT_EMPTY_PATH, STATX_ALL,
> {stx_mask=STATX_ALL|STATX_MNT_ID, stx_attributes=0, stx_mode=S_IFREG|0600,
> stx_size=31, ...}) = 0 13322 read(5, "[KSplash]\nTheme=org.kde.oxygen\n",
> 16384) = 31
> 13322 read(5, "", 16353) = 0
> 13322 close(5) = 0
> 13322 pipe2([5, 6], O_CLOEXEC) = 0
> 13322 pipe2([7, 8], O_CLOEXEC) = 0
> 13322 write(3, "\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0", 8) = 8
> 13322 getcwd("/home/purslow", 4096) = 14
> 13322 statx(AT_FDCWD, "/sbin/ksplashqml",
> AT_STATX_SYNC_AS_STAT|AT_NO_AUTOMOUNT, STATX_ALL, 0x7ffc1c147dc0) = -1
> ENOENT (No such file or directory) 13322 statx(AT_FDCWD,
> "/usr/sbin/ksplashqml", AT_STATX_SYNC_AS_STAT|AT_NO_AUTOMOUNT, STATX_ALL,
> 0x7ffc1c147dc0) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) 13322
> statx(AT_FDCWD, "/usr/local/sbin/ksplashqml",
> AT_STATX_SYNC_AS_STAT|AT_NO_AUTOMOUNT, STATX_ALL, 0x7ffc1c147dc0) = -1
> ENOENT (No such file or directory) 13322 statx(AT_FDCWD, "/bin/ksplashqml",
> AT_STATX_SYNC_AS_STAT|AT_NO_AUTOMOUNT, STATX_ALL, 0x7ffc1c147dc0) = -1
> ENOENT (No such file or directory) 13322 statx(AT_FDCWD,
> "/usr/bin/ksplashqml", AT_STATX_SYNC_AS_STAT|AT_NO_AUTOMOUNT, STATX_ALL,
> {stx_mask=STATX_ALL|STATX_MNT_ID, stx_attributes=0, stx_mode=S_IFREG|0755,
> stx_size=55728, ...}) = 0 13322 access("/usr/bin/ksplashqml", X_OK) = 0
>
> The final mention of KSplash is some way further down the long file :
>
> 13326 sendmsg(8, {msg_name=NULL, msg_namelen=0,
> msg_iov=[{iov_base="l\4\1\1\24\0\0\0\3\0\0\0\215\0\0\0\1\1o\0\25\0\0\0/org/
> fre"..., iov_len=160}, {iov_base="\17\0\0\0org.kde.KSplash\0", iov_len=20}],
> ms\ g_iovlen=2, msg_controllen=0, msg_flags=0}, MSG_NOSIGNAL <unfinished
> ...>
>
> Is that enough information to point towards a solution ?
Your ksplash error indicates the KDE splash screen when a plasma desktop
session is launched fails to start. You could try:
emerge -1av kde-plasma/plasma-workspace
in case this package is missing or for some reason was corrupted.
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