[SOLVED] Blocks when portage attempts to shift to KDE 6

asturm · Developer Joined: 05 Apr 2007 Posts: 9123

Who ever told you to look into SDDM config files? That was certainly not in the news item.

ericrhenry · n00b Joined: 02 Jul 2009 Posts: 39 Location: Bethesda, MD

@dmpogo Thanks, good point. As I mentioned just above, I was able to do a similar edit in the sddm.conf.d directory, which changed the sddm.log output, but still hung.

When I first looked at the top right in the login screen, I saw the same thing, that Wayland was still the default session. I changed that to plasma-x11 and proceeded to the login process. In this case the behavior was different, in that it continued on to that fixed backdrop screen I mentioned above, but stayed hung there as before. Still had mouse pointer, but had to Ctrl-Alt to get back to the terminal prompt.

Still, the sddm.log shows nothing of note, except that there is a complaint (still listed as WW rather than EE) that the greeter crashed, or something similar. I've reproduced here just the part of the sddm.log dealing with this last attempt (username is 'dummy', newly created):

https://bpa.st/DJAHK

(Sorry I have to rely purely on pastebins at this point, because the files are on a Linux machine and I am writing this on a separate Windows machine.)

This might somehow be considered progress, but I'm still left trying to figure out what has broken...

ericrhenry · n00b Joined: 02 Jul 2009 Posts: 39 Location: Bethesda, MD

@asturm. Agreed, that was not in the news item explicitly, but the implication was that I would have to change the default display server in my "display manager of choice", which happens to be sddm at the moment. Therefore, the conjecture was that I would have to make that change somewhere in the configuration of that specific display manager, which happens to be sddm.conf.d. (The man page appears to be out of date, because it still lists 'x11' as the default...) I only realized later that I can change that directly in the greeting screen, as noted in the most recent posts.

If that was wrong, or unwise, I'm happy to try anything else somebody would like to suggest. The news item seemed to leave it up to the reader to figure out how to execute that specific instruction, and this was the best I could do. I did regard going to a wayland default as 'interesting', because usually the user is left to choose such things, and I had never selected wayland before AFAIK. (Not saying the wayland default was a mistake, and it is noted in the news item, so I'm not throwing darts here.)

dmpogo · Advocate Joined: 02 Sep 2004 Posts: 3376 Location: Canada

ericrhenry · n00b Joined: 02 Jul 2009 Posts: 39 Location: Bethesda, MD

I second what @dmpogo has written. We both interpreted the instructions first in a "configuration file" context, and then he had the awareness to actually address the matter directly in the sddm greeting--which seems to be the most persistent solution (perhaps cached somewhere other than in sddm.conf.d).

ericrhenry · n00b Joined: 02 Jul 2009 Posts: 39 Location: Bethesda, MD

Let me back up a minute. In my @world file I still have a lot of dev-qt and kde-* entries which have explicit ':5' suffixes. (I only deleted those which created the soft blocks in the emerge operation, but left quite a few.) As I've said, I'm not sure how they got there, except that it is likely that they come from some kind of update operation I inadvertently performed without --oneshot. Does it make sense for me to either remove those suffixes, or even remove those entries entirely, and then do a fresh emerge @world? This might give Portage more leeway to manage possibly obsolete versions, and I'm still concerned about a possible version skew causing the crash/freeze events I am seeing.

Ideally, there would be some kind of verbose setting on the login operation somewhere, or perhaps some log file that shows exactly what is failing, or at least indicates the last operation before the freeze.

dmpogo · Advocate Joined: 02 Sep 2004 Posts: 3376 Location: Canada

ericrhenry · n00b Joined: 02 Jul 2009 Posts: 39 Location: Bethesda, MD

Thanks @dmpogo. I did understand that there is still a mix of :5 and :6 packages in play. I just wanted to rule out that a :5 application is being invoked when a :6 application is required. My proposed strategy is probably not the best, and I suspect that the whole slotting facility, which I understand only incompletely, probably manages such things implicitly.

I'm mainly looking for some kind of logging facility, which may already be present but "invisible" to me so far, that can tell me what detailed login executions have completed, and which might be hung. The sddm.log should in principle be adequate, but it is not showing a failure so far.

dmpogo · Advocate Joined: 02 Sep 2004 Posts: 3376 Location: Canada

dmpogo · Advocate Joined: 02 Sep 2004 Posts: 3376 Location: Canada

ericrhenry · n00b Joined: 02 Jul 2009 Posts: 39 Location: Bethesda, MD

KDE versioning issues aside, I am really just trying to get Plasma 6 to start up properly. I did manage to bring in xdm and configure that as my display manager, temporarily, so that I could at least have multiple windows and access to windowed emacs. (This actually takes me back to the '90s

...) But I'm pretty much addicted to multiple virtual desktops, multimedia support, and other nice KDE features, so this is not a long-term solution. I have been debugging things since the '70s, so I'm pretty comfortable with poking around, but KDE/Plasma can approach wizard level, and I'm without a grimoire. I'm relying on the kindness and patience of actual wizards, and I am still hoping for some guidance through this. Again, huge thanks in advance...

pietinger · Posted: Thu Sep 05, 2024 6:47 pm Post subject:

ericrhenry,

please delete everything in your world-file which has a slot ... you dont need it. Best is to have these two in your world (as a basis):

dmpogo · Advocate Joined: 02 Sep 2004 Posts: 3376 Location: Canada

ericrhenry · n00b Joined: 02 Jul 2009 Posts: 39 Location: Bethesda, MD

Thanks @pietinger. When I do that with the 'pretend' option instead of 'v', I see

[ebuild N ] dev-libs/kpathsea-6.3.5_p20230311 USE="-doc -source -static-libs"
[ebuild N ] app-text/dvipsk-2023.03.11_p66203 USE="-doc -source"
[ebuild rR ~] sci-libs/gdcm-3.0.14
[ebuild N ] kde-apps/kdialog-24.05.2 USE="X -debug"
[ebuild N ] kde-apps/kfind-24.05.2 USE="handbook -debug"
[ebuild N ] media-gfx/kio-ps-thumbnailer-24.05.2 USE="-debug"
[ebuild N ] kde-apps/keditbookmarks-24.05.2 USE="handbook man -debug -test"
[ebuild N ] kde-apps/baloo-widgets-24.05.2 USE="-debug -test"
[ebuild N ] kde-apps/thumbnailers-24.05.2-r2 USE="pdf -blender -gettext -mobi -raw -video"
[ebuild N ] www-client/falkon-24.05.2-r1 USE="X dbus kde -debug -python -test" PYTHON_SINGLE_TARGET="python3_11 -python3_10 -python3_12"
[ebuild N ] kde-apps/kate-lib-24.05.2 USE="-debug -telemetry -test"
[ebuild N ] kde-apps/kwrite-24.05.2 USE="handbook -debug"
[ebuild N ] kde-apps/dolphin-24.05.2-r1 USE="activities handbook semantic-desktop -debug -telemetry -test"
[ebuild NS ] kde-apps/khelpcenter-24.05.2 [23.08.5]
[uninstall ] kde-apps/khelpcenter-23.08.5
[blocks b ] kde-apps/khelpcenter:5 ("kde-apps/khelpcenter:5" is soft blocking kde-apps/khelpcenter-24.05.2)
[ebuild N ] kde-apps/kdecore-meta-24.05.2-r1 USE="share webengine"

* IMPORTANT: 9 news items need reading for repository 'gentoo'.
* Use eselect news read to view new items.

So, mostly new apps (few if any actually in the new world file), and things like dolphin which I don't use. (Might be tied to kdecore-meta, no problem with bringing them in.) I will go ahead and run this--Do you see anything that might be relevant to startup issues? 'gdcm' is from an overlay, which really needs to be updated because it currently fails every time; for that reason I will run with --keep-going.

asturm · Developer Joined: 05 Apr 2007 Posts: 9123

Note: These packages are doing nothing to get your Plasma session going, and I don't think pietinger meant you should install exactly that set of packages they use. It was an example.

ericrhenry · n00b Joined: 02 Jul 2009 Posts: 39 Location: Bethesda, MD

Thanks @dmpogo. After getting the initial emerge to work, I was frankly shocked when it failed to come up. I've always run a fairly vanilla configuration, accepting defaults for almost every characteristic, and I certainly didn't change anything in the setup in the course of attempting the upgrade. Interestingly, pretty much the same thing happened on both of my Linux laptop workstations. One of them is fortunately dual-boot Windows, which is where I'm typing this, and I'm probing and testing on the other one--with the assumption that solving one will solve the other.

I located in ~/.local/share/sddm two session log files. The one, xorg-session.log, is huge and probably covers a long history of successful logins, until this morning. The other one, wayland-session.log, is relatively very small and dated today, suggesting that, as expected, Wayland was only a part of the process after the attempted update; all such login attempts failed, before I switched to x11 (which is of course still failing). I've reproduced the wayland-session file here

https://bpa.st/SSAGU

One thing that grabbed my attention was apparent problems connecting to kdeinit5. I'm trying to interpret this file in terms of failure modes, probably a bit more detail than in sddm.log.

This reliance on kdeinit5 is interesting, because kinit:5, which owns this app and library, shows up as selected for cleaning if one does 'emerge -pv --depclean $(qlist -ISC kde-frameworks/*)', meaning if I actually did that depclean, kdeinit5 might be scheduled for the chopping block. (There is no kinit:6 yet AFAIK.)

ericrhenry · n00b Joined: 02 Jul 2009 Posts: 39 Location: Bethesda, MD

Thanks @asturm. I have enough of a clue (I think) to suspect that none of these really bears on the startup problem. (I did have to ask, though...) It serves the purpose of cleaning a lot of useless cruft out of my @world, and the emerge gives my newly empowered (by xdm, at least) system a chance to do something slightly useful in one window while I poke around in another

. I think the wayland-session.log file I just posted **might** be more on point, but I'm not sure I can interpret it without help.

ericrhenry · n00b Joined: 02 Jul 2009 Posts: 39 Location: Bethesda, MD

OK, my puzzlement only grows. As described previously, while operating within a temporary xdm environment, I executed the 'emerge -uUDv @world', after cleaning out all slotted entries in my @world file, as described by @pietinger. By all indications, this should not have had any bearing on the Plasma6 startup issue. After poking around a little, but not actually changing anything, I went back to 'sddm' in /etc/conf.d/display-manager and restarted the system (rather than just the display manager).

System came up, I attempted to login at the greeting screen (which actually showed plasma-x11 as the display server). To my shock, everything came up as usual (but with the same rather odd tree-on-a-hillside backbround), and things looks pretty much as before with Plasma 5. There was even an annunciator saying something to the effect that "Plasma has been updated to version 6".

I'm actually writing this within Firefox running under Plasma 6. Be it far from me to question such an outcome, except that I don't understand why it actually worked this time. (One upside is that I did learn a bit about intelligent package management, thanks to my kind advisors.) Now I need to see if the same 'remedy' works on the other laptop. I will post when I have a result on that...

pietinger · Posted: Thu Sep 05, 2024 9:44 pm Post subject:

ericrhenry · n00b Joined: 02 Jul 2009 Posts: 39 Location: Bethesda, MD

Understood @pietinger, and thanks. I tried 'emerge -cp' on my "revived" system. Unfortunately, the 'gdcm' package I mentioned earlier, which is in a --preserved-rebuild state, requires a version of poppler that is no longer available. Net result is that 'emerge -cp' bails. I actually need that package, and am hoping it gets updated soon, because a new version appears to be available, according to the developer's site.

A quick postscript to my previous post: Switching the display server at the sddm greeting screen to wayland still fails as before, and I'm not particularly inclined to try to troubleshoot that. (Enough anxiety for one day...) But using the x11 option continues to work through repeated login/logout cycles and restarts. (No surprise, just neurotic self-indulgence...)

ericrhenry · n00b Joined: 02 Jul 2009 Posts: 39 Location: Bethesda, MD

Same set of operations on the other, much older laptop yielded the same positive result. I still don't have a clear idea of why it worked, or insight into the cause of the initial failure.

This has been a bit of a hybrid thread, in that I initially posted about a bunch of soft blocks while attempting to emerge toward Plasma 6. That part is arguably 'SOLVED'. I followed up in the same thread with the startup issues, partly because it would carry over some of my configuration info from the initial issue. Even though there has been a positive outcome, because I don't understand why things worked out I'm not sure if 'SOLVED' is really fair. (Such would be useful if somebody seeing that could look at the thread and see a straight line to a solution of their own problem.) I am content to leave that decision with the moderators, if that is appropriate.

Huge thanks to everybody who chimed in.

dmpogo · Advocate Joined: 02 Sep 2004 Posts: 3376 Location: Canada

What is probably appropriate to do is to edit the subject line adding [SOLVED] in the beginning, since the original problem is solved.

finoderi · n00b Joined: 29 Oct 2021 Posts: 52

asturm · Developer Joined: 05 Apr 2007 Posts: 9123

Everyone can fix the wiki.

pietinger · Posted: Fri Sep 06, 2024 12:38 pm Post subject: