Plasma stopped working after upgrade to Stretch

[yuastnav]

Hey all,

today I upgraded my system from stable to the current testing version. I think almost everything went okay except that Plasma now doesn't work at all.
When I try to launch Plasma from KDM I get a black screen and two windows. One of them says that the system icon cannot be found. The other one states that Plasma could not start, specifically:

Code: Select all

All shell packages missing. This is an installation issue, please contact your distribution.

As per https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugrepo ... bug=834593 I looked whether I have
plasma-desktop and plasma-desktop-data
installed. As far as I can tell both of these packages have been installed when I did apt-get dist-upgrade and /var/log/apt/history.log seems to indicate the same thing.
However, I still cannot launch Plasma, since the I get the issue that I have described above. After doing apt-get install --reinstall and dpkg-reconfigure with these packages the issue still persists.

Any hints? Unfortunately I'm not even sure where to start looking for the necessary log files as to figure out what goes wrong.

[yuastnav]

Hey, thanks for your reply!
I did what you suggested. Unfortunately the same issue still persists.

[xanadu18]

To OP,

Why not install Stretch over your existing Jessie partition?

I just installed Debian 9 RC3 - KDE over my Jessie partition and everything including Plasma Desktop just works.

[yuastnav]

Unfortunately I don't have any time for that since it usualy takes me about a day to install and set up a new system as well as copy all my data before everything works the way I want it, but it looks like this is what I'll have to do in the end. Just don't have the time at the moment.

[millpond]

Try

dpkg --config -a

To make sure the configuration files are properly installed.

Then fire up synaptic and make sure all the relevant KDE and kdm packages are installed.

[yuastnav]

Thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately the problem persisted, even after I used sypantic to reinstall every KDE package.

However, I think the culprit in this case is KDE. The .desktop file for plasma in /usr/share/xsessions/ correctly states that startkde has to be executed but the problem mentioned above happens. I've just now realised that kdm is not in the current repository and has been replaced by sddm.

After I executed startkde from my current xfce session it started without a problem. So I used lightdm instead of kdm and it sort of worked.
For some reason there are two plasma entries in lightdm (since I don't know where the appropriate files for lightdm are I don't know how they differ), one of them doesn't work, I just get a black screen and after switching to a virtual terminal and back to the xserver the screen and/or the keyboard seems to freeze, I cannot even execute Alt+SysRq+REISUB; but the second Plasma entry DOES work and KDE starts without a problem.

I was quite happy with that until I ran into two problems, an annoying and a possibly severe one:

1. When a system sound plays it sets my volume to 100% which is pretty bad since I'm using headphones. Apparently it's a bug that is somehow connected to phonon and pulseaudio or something?

2. When I left the system for half an hour I came back to a terminal in recovery mode. I have no idea what happend since I just locked the screen and went away. I'll have to investigate further.