kubuntu-kde4-desktop 8.04 -> 8.10 upgrade changes session name

[Michael Vogt]

Binary package hint: kdebase

I did a kde4 hardy upgrade to intrepid. In kdm the default option is "use last session". That last session in hardy was kde4 (checked in .dmrc). Now in intrepid there is no such session anymore, its just called "kde" in /usr/share/xsessions.

This gives a bad expience as the user is thrown back into kdm after some seconds without further explaintaion what is wrong until the user switches the session type manually (to KDE).

It looks like all that is required to fix is a symlink from kde.desktop to kde4.deskotp in /usr/share/xsessions

[Roderick B. Greening (roderick-greening)]

I think the solution is to have kdm verify the session is valid, and if not use the default from kdm. But I need to look further..

[Scott Kitterman (kitterman)]

Should either be fixed or release noted for Intrepid.

[Alexandre Dutra (alexdut)]

I was experiencing the same problems after an upgrade from kde4 hardy to intrepid. Though I'm not sure this bug is a duplicate of #287488, since I never had gnome nor GDM installed, and besides, in my case the login fails with absolutely NO error messages displayed.
Anyway, it turns out that the problem for me was that, although the alternative used for x-session-manager was correctly set:

$ sudo update-alternatives --list x-session-manager
/usr/bin/startkde

... the symlink still pointed to the old value:

$ ls -lah /etc/alternatives/x-session-manager
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 17 2008-11-16 00:22 /etc/alternatives/x-session-manager -> /usr/lib/kde4/bin/startkde

A simple "sudo update-alternatives --set x-session-manager /usr/bin/startkde" did the trick and now everything works fine for me.