Bugzilla – Bug 192707
Unable to start KDE/GNOME when changing sessions
Last modified: 2006-07-17 09:40:32 UTC
Installed vanilla 10.1 w/KDE then via YaST installed the GNOME System. Intermittently when changing session type (GNOME to KDE) I am getting the following error messages: 1. The following installation problem was detected while trying to start KDE. No write access to /home/mwells/.ICEauthority. KDE is unable to start. 2. Could not start ksmserver. Check your installation. 3. There was an error setting up inter-process communication for KDE. The message returned by the system was: Could not read network connection list /home/mwells/.DCOPserver_tux_0. Please check that the "dcopserver" program is running. Attempting to restart GNOME cycles the login screen. Rebooting produces the same results as above (KDE is my default). I do not know how to reproduce as it happens randomly. What I do know is that I can not recover the system and have to do a partition restore to my last backup. I apologize if this is a duplicate. I did spend about an hour searching thru current bugzilla reports!
In retro I believe I may have performed some operation as root during each GNOME session before the failure occurred.
Your report sounds like some files in /home/mwells are owned by root and therefore not writeable with your normal user login - chown should fix this. I'll let it to the developers to decide if this is a bug or just PEBCAC ;-)
Lucky me! Not a case of PEBCAC (had to google that one). Launching "File Manager - Super User Mode" (konqueror) while in the GNOME desktop environment changes the owner:group to root:root on the .ICEauthority file (comment #1). Resetting owner:group while in su konqueror is only temporary as closing konqueror again resets it to root:root (on occasion the actual reset can take up to a minute or so but is almost always instantaneous on launch). Could not reproduce with any other root operations (YaST, Konsole in su mode). Thanks to Christian for pointing me in the right direction. At least I can work around this until it is resolved.
Additionally, entering [su -c "konqueror --profile filemanagement"] at a GNOME terminal reproduces the problem exactly as described in comment #3.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 177480 ***