KDE does no longer start - DBUS error - Awesome WM related problem

Question

Hi,
so I somehow managed to screw my KDE. I can no longer log in as my standard user, when I enter my username & password into the login-manager, the start process ends with a Window showing 'Could not start D-Bus. Can you call qdbus?'. When I press ok, I land back in the log-in screen.
The following is the content of ~/.xsession-errors:
/usr/bin/startkde: line 22: /usr/share/config/kdm/kde4-config: No such file or directory
Agent pid 2157
startkde: Starting up...
startkde: Could not start D-Bus. Can you call qdbus?
and at the end of the /var/log/kdm.log:
klauncher(2188) kdemain: No DBUS session-bus found. Check if you have started the DBUS server.
kdeinit4: Communication error with launcher. Exiting!
kdmgreet(2182)/kdecore (K*TimeZone*): KSystemTimeZones: ktimezoned initialize() D-Bus call failed: "Not connected to D-Bus server"
kdmgreet(2182)/kdecore (K*TimeZone*): No time zone information obtained from ktimezoned
Strange thing is, Dbus is running, so that should not be the problem.
So, I have asked around in the IRC channel, and was advised to move my .kde4 config, so that kde would create a new one. That did unfortunately nothing, the same problem persists. So then I created a new user for testing and voila, KDE starts under this user with the generated configs (even with the configs from the old user, though he wants to start everything as the old one and that causes problems).
Now my question is, what could be causing the problems? Dbus is surely running, as I can log in as the new testing-user, it also shows up in the process list, when I am logged in. Unfortunately it does not start up when I try to log in as the old user, and hence I can't start KDE. I was told, I could just delete the old user and create a new one to solve this issue, but I would like to avoid that.
Thanks in advance for any advice.
EDIT: Apparently the problem is related to awesome, after installing awesome, KDE seems to break after awesome is installed for every present user on the system. See also post #4.
Last edited by Defolos (2013-05-23 07:48:09)

Answer 1

berbae wrote:
Defolos wrote:So I just though about what happened before KDE died, and I remembered that I installed awesome, logged in, logged out and after that KDE was broken.
What happens if you reboot after uninstalling awesome, instead of just log out/log in? Does kde work again then?
Nope, did that immediately after KDE broke. Rebooted actually several times without awesome installed and it didn't help.
berbae wrote:You didn't say how you launched awesome: from kdm or from console or other way?
It is started from kdm.
berbae wrote:Say also if you have the systemd kdm.service enabled.
Cant tell you that right now, don't have the machine at work. Will check that later.
berbae wrote:
Look what processes are running (especially the dbus-daemon and xorg related processes):
before any WM/DE is launched,
when awesome is launched and running,
when you log out from awesome,
when you log in again, trying to launch kde
Use tty2 to check for the processes, when you don't have a command prompt (ctrl-alt-F2).
Only by searching you could find a clue for the possible cause of the problem; it will be the learning way.
As far as I remember it, dbus-daemon is launched when the system boots up. When I log in as a new user (hence with working KDE) it automatically starts another dbus process for kde as the new user. If i try that as the old (broken KDE) user, no dbus is started (and hence the problem).
berbae wrote:...Or take the easy way: just use a new user and don't install awesome again if you don't want to use it!
That was already suggested by some people in irc. I would like to avoid that because of two reasons:
first, I find this very unclean and ugly, I would like to fix the problem at its root
and second, I am afraid, that I might break the permissions in my whole home directory and nothing works anymore.
What I am currently suspecting is that when I install awesome (and probably also log in) it runs some script that configures dbus per-user and that breaks compatibility with KDE. Could you imagine something like that?