About 30% of booting my system, KDE does not start completely.
**How should I proceed to diagnose the cause? **Which logs might be helpful to look at?
Symptoms are:
- KRunner does not work, i.e. Alt-F2 does nothing. After entering krunner in a konsole, it works normally.
- The previously saved session is not restored (i.e. no programs are opened at all).
- The programs configured under autostart are not started.
- The power button, configured to shutdown the machine upon short press, is ignored (However, it works while switched to a console with Ctrl-Alt-F5).
- KDE’s configuration for the touchpad is different (i.e. vertical scrolling with two fingers is ticked, all other scrolls disabled; while normally I have it set to scroll on the edges both horizontal and vertical. Changing the setting takes immediate effect.)
- The screen remains unusually black for a couple of seconds after KDE’s own bootsplash vanishes, only the cursor is shown. After 2-3 seconds, the screen rebuilds and background and panels appear one after another.
Note that this does not happen all the time: if booting completes normally, then none of the above listed symptoms appears. For example, the KDE session of the previous normal boot is restored just fine - it is just as if the weird incomplete KDE boots in between the normal boot ups never happened. Same with the touchpad configuration: the configuration of a normal boot always reverts to the settings of the previously last normal boot, ignoring any changes made after an incomplete boot.
I am running openSUSE 13.1 with KDE 4.11.3 (should be the usual). Its a Dell M4500 laptop with Nvidia graphics, but I am not using the proprietary graphics driver. I sometimes use one of dual head configuration with extended desktop, but the problem occurs independently of the screen configuration (i.e. also if the laptop undocked and unconnected to an external screen). The system was upgraded from 12.3, which itself was a fresh install. However, some files in my home directory might date back to earlier versions (I do find a ~/.kde and a .~/.kde4 directory - isn’t one of them obsolete?). The problem already occurred with 12.3, but the occurrences were rare.