Plasma Won't Start

English Install/Boot/Login
1

Hi,

Hope someone can guide me…

Shutdown machine and powered off for a few hours. When powered back on, everything appears normal. After logon to KDE, i get the lightbulb icon and the spinning gear, which lasts for 10-15 seconds. Eventually I get the error:

The following installation problem was detected while trying to start Plasma:

No Write access to $HOME directory (/home/tim)

Plasma is unable to start

I had made no changes to the system before this. Funny thing is Cinnamon starts fine, so I’m guessing one of the plasma dirs or config files has an issue…i just need to know where to look.

I did run a dist update after this to see if maybe some kind of bug, but no changes.

Thanks in advance for any help

2

Get to a terminal (maybe CTRL-ALT-F2) and login at the command line. Then check ownership of home directory.

3

And if you have a separate file system for /home, check if it is mounted read-only:

mount | grep home
4

Output of ls -l /home/tim shows myself (tim) as the owner

Output of ls -l ~/ shows the same as well as for all hidden dirs, and ‘.’

Thanks

5

Output is

/dev/sdc1 on /home type ext4 (rw,noatime,discard)

I can logon to Cinnamon just fine, and all access to home dir (except for plasma) seem OK.

Thanks

6

And what are the permissions? Is it writable?

If you create a new test user is that user then able to login to KDE?

7

Hm, strange. When user tim can work without problems with Cinnamon, it can not really be a un-writable on a grand scale like the whole file system (which showed is rw). And you did not really show that /home/tim is writable for the owner, but as tim can do everything (inclusing writing) with Cinnamon.

BTW, when people here ask you to show output of a command, they want to see everything. And your ls -l /home/tim is far from complete. The result: we have to ask again. That does improve the speed/quality of the discussion. Best is of course copy/paste of tyhe text between CODE tags. I see you are rather new here (Welcome!), thus the following:
There is an important, but not easy to find feature on the forums.

Please in the future use CODE tags around copied/pasted computer text in a post. It is the # button in the tool bar of the post editor. When applicable copy/paste complete, that is including the prompt, the command, the output and the next
prompt.

An example is here: Using CODE tags Around your paste.

Regards,

[/FONT]

8

What had you been doing prior to shutting down the machine?

The message from kde/plasma could be a little more explicit. I guess (because that’s all we can do at the moment), wrong permissions/ownership somewhere below ~/ on either specific file(s) of directories… all rather vague.

9

A bit rough, but you could find files in tim’s home directory that tim can not write to with (as tim of course)

cd
find . -not -writable
10

Which, to extend your roughness, to check for stray ownership, one could follow with:

cd
find . -not -group users
find . -not -user tim
11

Yes, those are the obvious next steps.

If it will tell us something???/

12

All,

Thanks for the help…found out what it was.

Was getting ready to do a dump of the screen to this thread with the ls -l output, and realized I had some files in that dir I did not want to leave there in the listing.

Went to move them, and the perms on /home/tim had owner with file access only. All subdirs appear OK.

Gave owner r/w to /home/tim, all is well.

Still don;t know what caused this, as all I did previously was a shutdown/power off.

Thx for the help

13

Thanks for reporting back.