Unable to start up KDE due to hanging with a black desktop and movable mouse cursor.

[Kevin Krammer]

On Monday 19 November 2007, Phillip Pi wrote:

> Yes, I can run KDE applications under Gnome. So I go to Sound System and
> noticed it is not enabled. Since it was already disabled, I enabled it
> and retried KDE, but it failed as usual (hang). I restarted Gnome and
> tried the sound test in kcontrol's sound system. It works fine. I never
> had audio problems in the past. I do use ALSA sound system if that
> matters.
>
> Any other ideas to try or look for?

Hmm. I've seen your thread on kde-linux and it looks like something could be 
wrong with the 3.5.8 packages of Debian, though I haven't seen any complains 
on the debian-kde list.

If I remember correctly the "echo debugging" you did in startkde indicates 
that it hangs at starting ksmserver.
Unfortunately this does quite a lot, e.g. starting infrastructure services 
(knotify, kded), autostart handling, session restoring, etc.

Can you try modifying startkde so it starts ksmserver directly (without 
kwrapper), i.e. just

ksmserver $KDEWM

If it still hangs you could try something like

strace ksmserver $KDEWM 2> /tmp/ksmserver-strace

Cheers,
Kevin

-- 
Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer
KDE user support, developer mentoring
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