Cannot launch any programs

[Alex Ruddick]

I'm running KDE4 alongside GNOME on Jaunty. When I login to KDE4, I cannot launch any programs after the ones that are automatically started. I've tried plasma launchers, the main menu, and Krunner. Each time the program will give launch feedback (bouncing icon on cursor), and show a new entry in the system tray. No main window ever shows, though; and eventually the system tray tab will disappear.

I've attached ~./xsession-errors. Near the end are a couple of lines that seem to correspond to me launching firefox and synaptic.

[Marcus Asshauer (mcas)]

Thank you for reporting this bug. Have you upgraded from Intrepid or have you did a fresh install. Which version of KDE do you use? Have you installed the latest updates for Jaunty?

[Chris Snyder (csnyder)]

I am experiencing this as well, on two separate systems. They are both systems that were originally running standard Ubuntu, but were then switched over to Kubuntu by installing kubuntu-desktop and removing various Gnome-related packages (it's very possible that there are some remaining Gnome packages on each system - perhaps that is what's causing the problem). One system is 32-bit (home-built system with MSI motherboard, Athlon-XP-2000), and the other is AMD64 (HP Pavilion dv9010us laptop, AMD Turion X2 1.6 ghz). Both systems have Nvidia graphics cards and are running the non-free drivers.

This happens with a variety of programs: firefox, thunderbird, VMWare Workstation 6.5, and others. It seems to mostly be GTK apps that are problematic. Also, plasma freezes up at the same time - the K-menu button is unresponsive (including no mouseover effects); this lasts for a couple of minutes, when everything un-freezes, including responding to mouse-clicks that occurred while it was frozen. I'm not sure if the plasma freezes are related, but they seem to happen at the same time.

Running the programs outside of KDE (I'm currently using a very bare-bones X configuration running twm) works fine.

Attached is my .xsession-errors file as well. Note that I executed "/etc/init.d/kdm stop" to shut-down the session (which had become basically unresponsive), so that might explain some of the error messages at the very end.

[Chris Snyder (csnyder)]

Another detail: both systems were upgraded from Intrepid to Jaunty.

[Alex Ruddick (alexrudd0)]

Like Chris, I originally installed Ubuntu, then installed kubuntu-desktop. However, I've kept the gnome packages around, and have removed some of the KDE ones (kubuntu-desktop is no longer installed, etc). I also am using the nVidia non-free drivers.

Plasma occasionally freezes for me, but it seems unrelated to the launch problems. (not concurrent).

I haven't been able to launch Dolphin, which is Qt so the problem doesn't appear to be limited to GTK+ apps.

This machine has been upgraded from each successive Ubuntu release for several years, and is now running the latest Jaunty packages. (as of a day or two ago).

KDE packages are 4:4.2.1-0ubuntu1

[Alex Ruddick (alexrudd0)]

Over the life of this machine, I've had KDE4 installed from several different sources (mostly during Intrepid). Originally there was a PPA, then another one for newer versions. Now I'm back to using the official packages.

[Chris Snyder (csnyder)]

In case there is anyone wondering if it's KDE-specific: I've installed XFCE4 on both of my systems to get them usable again. Under XFCE, I've seen none of the problems that occurred under KDE.

More information on the problem: When I run the apps from a terminal, nothing unusual is displayed, though there is some indication that the programs start launching (VMWare, for instance, displays the normal "logging to /tmp/xxx.log" - unfortunately, the log provides no further info). The hung programs are easily killed with the default signal from kill[all] (no more forceful signal, such as -KILL, is needed).

I've confirmed that this happens as of the latest packages available today (March 9).

[Chris Snyder (csnyder)]

This seems to have been fixed sometime in the last week. Everything is working fine for me now.