It's a race condition. After login on, the splash screen is shown and often KDE start freezes at random times. Sometimes it's at the beginning of the progress bar, sometimes its when it reaches 2/3, sometimes even after it finishes. In that case the screen is black with mouse cursor. It's movement is very choppy. To unfreeze the proces you have to switch to text tty. KDE immediately resumes loading. You even do not have to log in on the text console. Reproducible: Sometimes
>It's a race condition. Between what?
(In reply to David Edmundson from comment #1) > >It's a race condition. > Between what? No idea, it's my guess, because not only it doesn't happen every time, but also when it happens it is in different parts of the loading process.
I have the same problem. KDE always freezes with the splash screen. It can be reproduced. I am having Debian unstable with 4.4. I cannot use KDE any more. I can go to terminal and give more information. Strg+Alt+F1 works.
Can we switch this bug to confirmed. I can reproduce it and I can give more information about it. Perhaps my bug is a different bug. But I think we can use this bug number. For me a freeze is a freeze.
Created attachment 96792 [details] Xsession-Errors File Here is my .xsession-errors file. I think it gives some information. But I am not able to understand this.
It is plasma 5.4. Not as I said before 4.4.
Log shows kwin (the window manager) is crashing. It also shows the debug dialog starting..but I guess that doesn't help as we don't have a window manager From a TTY can you start another window manager with DISPLAY=:0 openbox (after installing openbox of course) That should give you a desktop; and then we can try and get a backtrace from kwin.
Tried this. Openbox does not come up. I have still the splasher background on my screen.
ksplash will disappear after 30 seconds, worst case you can kill it. Though if openbox still isn't coming up, it sounds like the problem is lower down than plasma.
I killed ksplashgml with -9. Now I have KDE running. But there is no window border, no panel and no way to move windows. Seems as you said, kwin is not running. I can start Konsole.
Started kwin directly from konsole. Now it is running.
- start run "DISPLAY=:0 gdb kwin_x11" from a TTY type "run" to start it when it crashes from the TTY type: - set logging on - bt - quit then attach the file gdb.log from that directory.
Restarted computer. The problem is gone. KDE starts directly without problems.
OK. Even though we clearly had a bug somewhere, I'm gonna have to close this as we'll never be able to do anything with the information we have. If you can make kwin crash again and can get a trace, let me know.
Problem is back...
The problem comes and goes. Sometimes killing kplashgml helps, sometimes not. But kwin from TTY never crashes, so I can't get the gdb.log. I wait for the next update and report again. Thanx a lot for your support. Now I know how to use gdb for providing more information.