SUMMARY Around 3 months ago on my Kubuntu 24.04 Linux I started to get a popup window with the error: --- Title: kreadconfig5 Configuration file "/root/.config/kreadconfig5rc" not writable. Please contact your system administrator. --- And I can't find a source of this message, but it is very annoying! It starts to appear even with an empty session, when no apps are running! Maybe it's related to some updates of some packages, or some other activities, but I didn't do any specific that can trigger this error. Here is the process tree of these messages: ``` /sbin/init splash └─ /bin/sh /usr/bin/xdg-settings get default-web-browser └─ kreadconfig5 --file kdeglobals --group General --key BrowserApplication └─ /usr/bin/kdialog --title kreadconfig5 --msgbox Configuration file "/root/.config/kreadconfig5rc" not writable. Please contact your system administrator. ├─ /usr/bin/kdialog --title kreadconfig5 --msgbox Configuration file "/root/.config/kreadconfig5rc" not writable. Please contact your system administrator. ├─ /usr/bin/kdialog --title kreadconfig5 --msgbox Configuration file "/root/.config/kreadconfig5rc" not writable. Please contact your system administrator. ├─ /usr/bin/kdialog --title kreadconfig5 --msgbox Configuration file "/root/.config/kreadconfig5rc" not writable. Please contact your system administrator. └─ /usr/bin/kdialog --title kreadconfig5 --msgbox Configuration file "/root/.config/kreadconfig5rc" not writable. Please contact your system administrator. ``` STEPS TO REPRODUCE 1. Log in as a user. 2. Do some work - open apps, do some activitiy. Or even do nothing, keep the session just idle for several hours. 3. See around 3-20 error messages. OBSERVED RESULT There should be no error messages like this! EXPECTED RESULT SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS Operating System: Kubuntu 24.04 KDE Plasma Version: 5.27.11 KDE Frameworks Version: 5.115.0 Qt Version: 5.15.13 Kernel Version: 6.8.0-41-generic (64-bit) Graphics Platform: X11 ADDITIONAL INFORMATION I have found a similar bug report here https://github.com/Octachron/olivine/issues/4 but it didn't helped with finding out the root source of this error. So, if someone started to receive the same problem - let's join forces! And if someone has an idea on how to debug this - please share!
If I run the command from the process tree manually, it works well without throwing an error: ``` $ xdg-settings get default-web-browser /home/alexey_korepov/.local/share/applications/firefox.desktop ``` But if I run it with root: ``` $ sudo su - # xdg-settings get default-web-browser /usr/bin/xdg-settings: 32: cannot create /tmp/xdg.log: Permission denied /usr/bin/xdg-settings: 33: cannot create /tmp/xdg.log: Permission denied /usr/bin/xdg-settings: 34: cannot create /tmp/xdg.log: Permission denied /usr/bin/xdg-settings: 35: cannot create /tmp/xdg.log: Permission denied org.kde.falkon.desktop ``` it started to warn about the permission denied of the `/tmp`.
I finally found the source of this annoying popup message using cgroup! ``` $ cat /proc/53272/cgroup 0::/system.slice/opswatclient.service ``` So, it's caused by the OPSWAT service and not related to KDE at all, so closing the issue.