After an upgrade KDE has become unuseable

[John Hunter]

KDE 14.04 beta-1
Installed 06-mar-14; immediately followed by 272 ugrades using sysnaptic (Muon Discover proved absolutely useless; used it to install Muon; used muon to install synaptic -- this process apparently mangled 6 packages!). Applied two batches of upgrades on 07-mar-14 without incident. 08-mar-14: experimenting, managed to upgrade 4 packages using muon discover; synaptic found two more packages to upgrade. On booting around midday today (09-mar-14) found KDE desktop corrupted:
1) 12 desktops reduced to 1; all attempts to restore the other 11 desktops achieved nothing.
2) Bottom bar appered to be in chaos
3) All windows had no frame; they could not be raised, lowered, moved or resized.
4) All windows were placed top left, so effectively one could only run one application at a time -- in such a way that the system was virtually unuseable.
5) Access effectively denied to dialog windows; could not authenticate to load synaptic.
6) Firefox opened as a "letter-box" across the top of the screen; effectively, could not be used.
7) I managed to update 2 (irrelevent) packages from command line (recovery mode: apt-get dist-upgrade)
8) Desktop backgrounds reverted to default.
System is unusable. To make this report a have hooked up a 12.04 system on a laptop disc.

Host system: ASUSteck desktop:
Intel i5-2320 CPU (3GHz), 6GB ram, 1TB + 2TB (+ USB 1TB 2.5" USB) discs. I do not think it is resource constrained.
Screen 1680x1050

[Ubuntu Foundations Team Bug Bot (crichton)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. It seems that your bug report is not filed about a specific source package though, rather it is just filed against Ubuntu in general. It is important that bug reports be filed about source packages so that people interested in the package can find the bugs about it. You can find some hints about determining what package your bug might be about at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/FindRightPackage. You might also ask for help in the #ubuntu-bugs irc channel on Freenode.

To change the source package that this bug is filed about visit https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1290038/+editstatus and add the package name in the text box next to the word Package.

[This is an automated message. I apologize if it reached you inappropriately; please just reply to this message indicating so.]

[John Hunter (jmdh01)]

I have now installed netrunner 13.12 over Kubuntu 14.04 beta-1. Initially KDE 4.11.5 sort of worked in sofar as it gave me back my 12 desktops complete with the correct wallpapers for each desktop. Secondly, the bottom panel was configured correctly. However there were still no window frames. I was able to rename the ~/.kde directory to ~/_kde_u14.04-beta, logged in again with a clean sheet and spent an hour or so resetting up Kde from scratch. From this I have deduced:
(1) there is something in the upgrade on pm 08-mar-2014 that mangled my .kde tree which told kde/qt not to display window frames;
(2) in the upgrade, there is bug which inhibits/prohibits multiple desktops.

I trust this will help.

[Harald Sitter (apachelogger)]

please run the following command on the kubuntu installation

`apport-collect 1290038`

also please throw /var/log/apt/ and /var/log/dpkg.log* into a tar file and attach it to this bug report, as we'd likely need to know which updates actually were installed at what point.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for kdebase-workspace (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]