Could not start ksmserver. Check installation.

I keep getting the following message every time I try and login to KDE: “Could not start ksmserver. Check installation”. I installed openSUSE 11.3 Milestone 7, installed KDE 4.5 BETA 1 using a one click install link, changed some settings on my KDE installation (including some settings for my touchpad using KDE’s control centre) and then rebooted.

When I googled this a few people mentioned that it may be to do with file permissions. I have tired going into the terminal by pressing CTRL+ALT+F1 and entering the following but to the error still occurs:

sudo chown -R connel /home/connel
sudo chmod -R u+w /home/connel

Lots of people seem to get this problem after editing their xorg.conf also. Would changing the settings for my touchpad have done this?

How can I fix this?

Thanks inadvance

You installed all sorts of beta software and are surprised that thing broke???

Maybe you need to check on the beta forum.

Moved to beta

I never said I was “suprised” it didn’t work. Plenty of other people have sucessfully installed kde 4.5 on top of milestone 7 and was merely asking if anyone could help me with this error message. Sorry I posted in the wrong place. thanks for moving.

Personally I would boot to level 3 and try yast from there and check your packaging, maybe re-install kde base and desktop patterns
Level 3 Boot and Yast - Windows Live

I got he same error but a zypper dup fixed the problem.
I have followed the prereleased kde 4.5b for a couple of weeks on my 11.2 partition and off and on again on 11.3ms* my last install of kde4.5b
on one of my 11.3 partitions gave me the ksmserver error.

Hi thanks for your help everyone :slight_smile: when I installed KDE 4.5 I used the one click install from here:

KDE - KDE SC 4.4.80 Info Page

I clicked on the factory link. Factory is 11.3 isn’t it? Then half way through I got loads of errors coming up about dependencies. I selected use vendor changes for all the packages that had an error. Today I reinstalled everything but this time clicked on install package anyway and break it.

Now I don’t get the error message but the slash screen just fades to a black screen. The KDE start-up sound is made and if I change my volume on my laptop I get the little notification come up and if I press the power button I get the shutdown dialogue. Apart from this all I get is a cursor and a black screen.

How do I get to boot level three? Is it the same as pressing CTRL+ALT+F1 or CTRL+ALT+F2? Or is it when you select failsafe from grub?

I’m used to using Apt-get in Ubuntu, what’s a “zypper dup”?

Sorry I’ve been using Ubuntu and Kubuntu for years now and thought I’d try out openSUSE because .debs weren’t available for KDE 4.5 on Kubuntu and heard openSUSE was a better KDE distro :slight_smile: I also like how Novell supports upstream more :slight_smile:

Oh yeah another change I made when I reinstalled everything was I reformatted my /home partition. Previously I did not reformat it. Don’t know if that helps but judging by what everyone is saying it sounds like its a problem with the packaging :slight_smile:

Zypper/Usage/11.2 - openSUSE

dup = distribution upgrade

Maybe you should take baby steps before diving in at the deep end?

Thanks for your help :smiley: I did a Zypper upgrade and it works fine now :slight_smile:

Lol yeah that’s probably true, I didn’t think a one-click install would break my system :stuck_out_tongue:

Anyway now I’ve got it up and running I think KDE 4.5 is going to be a great release if this better is anything to go by :smiley: All the animations in the panel are alot smoother than previously (For me anyway, may be that was just Kubuntu) and I really like the notification area. I also installed rekonq and think its shaping up very nicely indeed!

Just a little question - does anyone if rekonq will be default for opensuse in the future like Kubuntu?

I didn’t think a one-click install would break my system
Think again.
If this tells you anything, I don’t know: ‘I never use them

does anyone if rekonq will be default for opensuse
I don’t know. But my guess - In a word: No

Ah ok lol. Well thanks for all your advice, really appreciate it :slight_smile:

You are most welcome

Hit same problem, I used dirty hack. Edit /usr/bin/startkde as superuser.


sudo mcedit /usr/bin/startkde

look for first appereance of ksm
and add line with ksmserver. It should look like this


# * Then ksmserver is started which takes control of the rest of the startup sequence

# The user's personal KDE directory is usually ~/.kde, but this setting
# may be overridden by setting KDEHOME.

kdehome=$HOME/.kde4
test -n "$KDEHOME" && kdehome=`echo "$KDEHOME"|sed "s,^~/,$HOME/,"`

#hack, start ksmserver
/usr/bin/ksmserver

I have a very similar problem. Read how nice KDE 4.5 was and decided to install. I think I ended up with some combination of 4.4, 4.5 and 4.6.

I could not log in because of the could not start kmserver problem.

I fixed it by making a network install CD, running the update from it.

It wanted to get rid of all my repos, but I changed them all to keep them.

It installed roughly 550 packages but when it was done it worked!

For some reason, my first attempt was using the wireless adapter on my laptop, it could not load the repos that way. Not sure why. Did the update again connected the the wired networked and it worked.