[SOLVED] After upgrade from KDE4 to Plasma serious problems

mcloaked · 2015-12-11 15:57:36

One of my machines is an Intel DQ77KB motherboard with an i3 Ivybridge processor - and has graphics:

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200 v2/3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller (rev 09)

After upgrading from a working KDE4 system to plasma 5.5 yesterday the upgrade seemed to go well - but when I logged in as user the first time after the upgrade the login hung, after a normal looking sddm greeter, with no cursor and nothing on the screen except a background normal picture. After many hours of googling I found that there is a major bug in some Intel graphics drivers particularly concerning the mesa package and xf86-video-intel that has exposed significant issues for plasma 5 on Intel hardware.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page= … iver-crash

https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-dist … 00088.html

I was unaware that my hardware was one that was impacted by this bug so now I needed to find a way to get a graphical login. I eventually found that by ssh into the machine as root I could add in some lines to the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/90-libinput.conf

Section "Device"
        Identifier  "Intel Graphics"
        Driver      "intel"
        Option      "AccelMethod"  "uxa"
        Option      "DRI" "False"
EndSection

Having only the uxa line still failed to allow a completed graphical login. However with the DRI false I could finally get a login to a blank login screen but at least with a menu at top left of the screen and a working mouse cursor.

I was able to add a panel to the bottom of the screen - and indeed I now have access to the system settings.

However if I select to add a program item from the K menu at the bottom left to the panel (with widgets unlocked) then nothing happens when using "Add item to panel" or "Add item to desktop". I have change to the alternative cascading kickoff and it remains the same. Presumably the hung initial login has failed to set some plasma config files properly, so I would appreciate some advice on how this might be fixed?

Is there a normal way to clean up after a failed initial login to the plasma desktop?

Any advice appreciated. Thanks.

Edit: I eventually found a thread with some advice to do the following:

rm -f ~/.cache/plasma*
rm -f ~/.cache/ksycoca*
rm -f ~/.cache/*.kcache
kbuildsycoca5

which did not seem to do anything - but then I decided to remove the panel and start a new one - I found that there were two panels at the bottom of the screen and from the K menu Adding items to the panel had added them to the panel that was hidden underneath the one that was visible. Removing the top panel then allowed the hidden one to become the only and correctly working panel. So the desktop is now functional. I will therefore mark this as solved.

Last edited by mcloaked (2015-12-11 18:08:53)

hydn · 2015-12-13 07:08:30

Thanks for posting this. Yup, I'm waiting a few more weeks. Not so "stable" yet after all. In a few months they'll be enough support threads about all the many issues saving time I don't have right now.

Arch Linux

#1 2015-12-11 15:57:36

[SOLVED] After upgrade from KDE4 to Plasma serious problems

#2 2015-12-13 07:08:30

Re: [SOLVED] After upgrade from KDE4 to Plasma serious problems

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