Kubuntu 18.04: Konqueror won't show man/info pages

[Ron Widell]

Per the KDE docs at https://docs.kde.org/stable5/en/applications/konqueror/man-info.html, https://docs.kde.org/stable5/en/kdenetwork/kioslave5/man/index.html and https://docs.kde.org/stable5/en/kdenetwork/kioslave5/info/index.html, I should be able to read GNU-Linux man and info pages from within Konqueror. Unfortunately, that feature no longer works in Kubuntu 18.04 (it has worked through 16.04).

If I enter man:/<command> or info:<command> in Konqueror, I only get a blank page while the little icon to the right of the search field in the toolbar spins endlessly. Since the KDE docs say I should be able to open those pages in Kwrite, I decided to give it a try. I clicked the "open" button and entered man:/ls in the "name" field of the subsequent window. It did, indeed open the ls(1) man page, but it appeared as raw html. As I read https://docs.kde.org/stable5/en/kdenetwork/kioslave5/man/index.html, that is the expected behavior although it does make it much less readable than viewing in Konqueror where the html/css formatting is applied to look more like a real manpage.

Curiously, the man kio-slave starts to work in Konqueror. If I enter man: in the address field of the Konqueror toolbar, it show manpage sections from man(0) through man(9) to man(l) (lower case L,, not a 1), including sections for POSIX variations. If I enter man:/(1)/, it shows all of the manpages in section one, albeit in an order which is definitely NOT alphabetical. Unfortunately, selecting one of those choices results in the blank page and a spinning icon.

While reading man and ifo pages from within Konqueror is only one of the reasons I prefer the KDE desktop, it one of the more important reasons for me.

$ lsb_release -rd
Description: Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS
Release: 18.04

$ apt-cache policy konqueror
konqueror:
  Installed: 4:17.12.3-0ubuntu1
  Candidate: 4:17.12.3-0ubuntu1
  Version table:
 *** 4:17.12.3-0ubuntu1 500
        500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic/universe amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

If you need more info, please let me know.

Thank you,
ron
,
,

[Ron Widell (r-widell)]

I installed KHelp Center to see if that is similarly affected. It's NOT.

It seems to affect only Konqueror.

ron

[Ron Widell (r-widell)]

FWIW

I have no idea if this is related, but dwww (which may be considered to be a reasonable alternative) behaves the same way: it will display the table of contents of man or info pages but won't display the pages themselves.

ron

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Jamie White (jagie)]

Yes, it would be really good if this could be fixed!

[Kubuntu Kjar (kubuntu-q)]

This was broken for me in the latest bionic 18.04-3, with or without backports.

A work around seems to be to switch konqueror's Default Web Browser Engine to the KHTML renderer in Settings::Configure Konqueror::General. That makes the bug this one: KDE Bugtracking System – Bug 377084.

A partial fix for that bug was committed upstream in July, 2018, here: https://phabricator.kde.org/D13924

I think the KHTML engine may have issues if you use it for browsing around, including some security issues, so be warned that the work-around may be best when using konqueror for local tasks rather than as the main web browser.