Kubuntu update of 2013-Feb-09: KDE desktop does not start anymore/black screen/startkde deleted by update

[Torsten Eichstädt]

System: Kubuntu 12.04.2 LTS w/ backports PPA enabled, x86_64

After the update of Kubuntu in the very early morning (about 6:00 MET) of Feb 9th, 2013, the KDE desktop does not start anymore. X11 and kdm runs, as does the XBMC standalone session. When starting the update, the where packages being marked for update, but could not be updated immediately.

I tried to start KDE manually, but there is no /usr/bin/startkde anymore... After login via kdm, the screen turns black, with only the mouse pointer visible. Fortunately I can run firefox from within XBMC to view the football results (and file bug reports).

Starting any KDE app (from the commandline) results in a segmentation fault.

This is urgent!

- Who is able to turn the KDE developers attitude from implementing the latest and greatest 'hip' technologies towards robustness and quality ASAP???
- Is there any way to undo the last update?
- How can I finalize the update?

Thanx in advance, Torsten

P.S. IMHO it is much too complicated for non-nerd users to find out how to file bug reports when one does not know which package has the bug.

[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.

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[Philip Muškovac (yofel)]

Hi,

can you please attach your /var/log/apt/history.log and /var/log/apt/term.log to the bug please? That might tell us whether something went wrong during the upgrade.

If startkde is missing, try this:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop

as it seems that the upgrade might have removed a bit too much.

[Torsten Eichstädt (torsten-eichstaedt)]

Thank you very much for answering so quickly! I appended the two log files as you requested. Yesterday I tried 'apt-get update' and apt-get upgrade' which updated only the german translations package. Now I re-installed kubuntu-desktop, afterwards I'll tell whether that fixes the desktop.

[Philip Muškovac (yofel)]

That should help. history.log shows:
Remove: kubuntu-desktop:amd64 (1.254), kde-workspace-bin:amd64 (4.9.5-0ubuntu0.1~ubuntu12.04.1~ppa4), kubuntu-netbook:amd64 (1.254), kde-workspace:amd64 (4.9.5-0ubuntu0.1~ubuntu12.04.1~ppa4), kscreensaver:amd64 (4.9.5-0ubuntu0.1~ubuntu12.04.1~ppa1), kscreensaver-xsavers:amd64 (4.9.5-0ubuntu0.1~ubuntu12.04.1~ppa1)

where kde-workspace-bin contains startkde. Installing kubuntu-desktop will pull that in and should make KDE work again.

[Torsten Eichstädt (torsten-eichstaedt)]

Everything's fine now. The desktop starts again after I installed kubuntu-desktop and plasma-scriptengines (the latter was suggested). I did not try the netbook appearance yet which I use when using the laptop w/o additional monitor, but that's of minor importance. After backing up my data I'll try to switch to PC-BSD, with ZFS and snapshots I can easily roolback updates should things go wrong.

Thanks very much again.

P.S. The default browser, rekonq, crashes when accessing the launchpad pages...

[Philip Muškovac (yofel)]

Can you please attach all old apt history log files to the bug please? We need some more context to reproduce this.
They're
/var/log/apt/history.log.1.gz
/var/log/apt/history.log.2.gz
etc...

Thanks!

[Harald Sitter (apachelogger)]

Please post the output of

cat /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/*

[Philip Muškovac (yofel)]

Thanks!
That helps, but apt is still playing hide and seek with us sadly. One more thing that might help us is the output of

dpkg --get-selections

if you could attach it to the bug please. That will tell us all packages that are installed on your system.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for Kubuntu PPA because there has been no activity for 60 days.]