KDE black screen bug after updates

It appears that the updates to KDE 4.8 (from 4.7) may have broken the desktop for some Kororaa users. You might experience a black screen when you log in. You can still launch programs by pressing Alt + F2, but your regular desktop is missing.

This is because of incompatibilities between versions of the configuration file for the desktop plasmoids (plasma-desktop-appletsrc) that Kororaa ships (this bug does not affect Fedora as it does not ship this file). The upcoming 17 release will not ship this file.

To fix the problem, just move (or delete) this file out of the way. If that doesn’t work, you can try moving your entire .kde directory out of the way and it will create a new one when you next log in.

When it’s booted and before logging into KDE, switch to a terminal by pressing:
Ctrl + Alt + F2

Then log in as your user, and run:
mv .kde/share/config/plasma-desktop-appletsrc .kde/share/config/plasma-desktop-appletsrc-broken

Then logout:
exit

Switch back to the graphical login:
Ctrl + Alt + F1

And log in. You may have to re-create some KDE settings, like shortcuts in the panel, but it should get you going at least.

Alternatively you can press Alt + F2 and run “System Settings”, select “Workspace Behaviour” and change the “Workspace” type to the netbook interface.

9 thoughts on “KDE black screen bug after updates

  1. This is a Kororaa only bug I believe because I shipped a plasma-desktop-appletsrc by default, which is what broke post update. I understand (now) that this is not a good way to customise the KDE desktop system wide 🙂

    -c

  2. Thanks Chris. All restored :-). My limited analysis was heading down the wrong track so thanks for the solution.

  3. Thanks! Got this problem yesterday on Debian Testing (Wheezy). I’ve tried dpkg-reconfigure kde, apt-get install –reinstall kde, apt-get purge kde + apt-get autoremove –purge, it’s silly that user config files are still here when purging a package…
    I didn’t think to that .kde folder, so thank you 🙂

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  5. Thank you very much, I add this problem several times on my professional VM a CentOS / “Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 7.5”, and the only solution was to fully re-install the VM and all its components, one day of work !
    So fix to your fix it easy to fix now.
    Cheers

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