Bug 192707

Summary:	Unable to start KDE/GNOME when changing sessions
Product:	[openSUSE] SUSE Linux 10.1	Reporter:	Mike Wells <mike_wells>
Component:	KDE	Assignee:	E-mail List <kde-maintainers>
Status:	RESOLVED DUPLICATE	QA Contact:	E-mail List <qa-bugs>
Severity:	Major
Priority:	P5 - None	CC:	suse-beta
Version:	Final
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	i686
OS:	SuSE Linux 10.1
Whiteboard:
Found By:	Customer	Services Priority:
Business Priority:		Blocker:	---
Marketing QA Status:	---	IT Deployment:	---

Description Mike Wells 2006-07-15 13:45:29 UTC

Installed vanilla 10.1 w/KDE then via YaST installed the GNOME System. Intermittently when changing session type (GNOME to KDE) I am getting the following error messages:

1. The following installation problem was detected while trying to start KDE. No write access to /home/mwells/.ICEauthority. KDE is unable to start.

2. Could not start ksmserver. Check your installation.

3. There was an error setting up inter-process communication for KDE. The message returned by the system was: Could not read network connection list /home/mwells/.DCOPserver_tux_0. Please check that the "dcopserver" program is running.

Attempting to restart GNOME cycles the login screen. Rebooting produces the same results as above (KDE is my default).

I do not know how to reproduce as it happens randomly. What I do know is that I can not recover the system and have to do a partition restore to my last backup.

I apologize if this is a duplicate. I did spend about an hour searching thru current bugzilla reports!

Comment 1 Mike Wells 2006-07-15 14:39:31 UTC

In retro I believe I may have performed some operation as root during each GNOME session before the failure occurred.

Comment 2 Christian Boltz 2006-07-15 20:53:59 UTC

Your report sounds like some files in /home/mwells are owned by root and therefore not writeable with your normal user login - chown should fix this.

I'll let it to the developers to decide if this is a bug or just PEBCAC ;-)

Comment 3 Mike Wells 2006-07-16 01:04:00 UTC

Lucky me! Not a case of PEBCAC (had to google that one).

Launching "File Manager - Super User Mode" (konqueror) while in the GNOME desktop environment changes the owner:group to root:root on the .ICEauthority file (comment #1). Resetting owner:group while in su konqueror is only temporary as closing konqueror again resets it to root:root (on occasion the actual reset can take up to a minute or so but is almost always instantaneous on launch). Could not reproduce with any other root operations (YaST, Konsole in su mode).

Thanks to Christian for pointing me in the right direction. At least I can work around this until it is resolved.

Comment 4 Mike Wells 2006-07-16 22:35:49 UTC

Additionally, entering [su -c "konqueror --profile filemanagement"] at a GNOME terminal reproduces the problem exactly as described in comment #3.

Comment 5 Dirk Mueller 2006-07-17 09:40:32 UTC


*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 177480 ***