KDE-4.4 upgrade causes desktop crash

[Brain]

Hi,

I'm reporting this bug under kde-meta, though it's not maybe the relevant package. The bug happens after upgrading Kubuntu-9.10 (i386) to KDE-4.4 from Backports. The Kubuntu upgrade does not contain the plasma-desktop and it has to be installed manually. However this is difficult since the KDE is not usable after upgrading.

See more the KDE bugtracking DB:

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=226263

Please move this bugreport into the proper category if needed.

Hope this can be fixed and a working KDE-4.4 upgrade for Kubuntu will be available soon.

Thanks!
Brain

[Rohan Garg (rohangarg)]

I had this bug in RC2 but when i upgraded to RC3 all was fine and the desktop started normally,also in Lucid well have custom scripts to reset the desktop and add the previous settings after every upgrade

[markusl (markus-mnslaker)]

I had a similar problem. The root cause is that upgrading via systemsettings or `apt-get upgrade' will install only about half the packages you need, leaving KDE unbootable. To get a working system, first add the PPA as described in the instructions, and then quit systemsettings without installing or upgrading anything. Open a Bash prompt (in Konsole, for example) and run the following commands:

sudo apt-get remove plasma-widget-fancytasks

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

You'll probably be asked for your password by the first of these commands, and also by the others if you don't run them soon enough.

Removing the fancy-tasks widget (if you have it) is essential, because it causes KDE 4.4 to crash very soon after you log in. If you don't have this package installed, the `apt-get remove' command will fail; this is not a problem: just move on to the other commands.

Although I've not tried it, I imagine these three commands could also be used to rescue a half-upgraded KDE system that won't run. Drop into a virtual console by typing Ctrl+Alt+F1 (if you're on a PC) or RightCtrl+F1 (if you're in VirtualBox), log in, run the three commands, and reboot (on a PC) or restart the VM (on VirtualBox).

[Brain (brain)]

Thanks a lot Markus, that helped! I've successfully updated my KDE to 4.4 and now everything seems to work fine.

[rrfx (rrfx)]

Thanks. Installing the package 'plasma-desktop' got my karmic install half-way working.

The crash reports were then pointing to the ruby interpreter. Rather than hunting down the particular plasmoid/ruby script that was causing the crash I reset my desktop configuration by removing $HOME/.kde/share/config/plasma-desktop-appletsrc

[Harald Sitter (apachelogger)]

Original problem (missing plasma-desktop) is fixed by backport kubuntu-desktop