F8 update kills KDE

[Kevin Kofler]

TNWestTex <mcforum <at> bellsouth.net> writes:
> After being on vacation, I thought to catch up with the updates for F8. 
> Rebooting to the updated system and KDE is hosed.  The xserver starts and
> the initialization begins but drops back to the command console.  There seem
> to be two elements to the problem.  Something called PolicyKit is suddenly
> active and blocking access to some elements and there are missing .so files.

Looks like you have several unrelated warnings and errors there:

> W: polkit.c: Failed to show grant dialog: Unable to lookup exe for caller
> W: polkit.c: PolicyKit responded with 'auth_admin_keep_always'
> N: main.c: Called SUID root and real-time/high-priority scheduling was
> requested in the configuration. However, we lack the necessary priviliges:
> N: main.c: We are not in group 'pulse-rt' and PolicyKit refuse to grant us
> priviliges. Dropping SUID again.
> N: main.c: For enabling real-time scheduling please acquire the appropriate
> PolicyKit priviliges, or become a member of 'pulse-rt', or increase the
> RLIMIT_NICE/RLIMIT_RTPRIO resource limits for this user.

These are from PulseAudio and safe to ignore. PulseAudio is just unhappy 
because it can't use real-time priority, but this doesn't really break 
anything.

> xset:  bad font path element (#94), possible causes are:
>     Directory does not exist or has wrong permissions
>     Directory missing fonts.dir
>     Incorrect font server address or syntax

That sounds bad, I'm not sure how bad though.

> startkde: Starting up...
> kbuildsycoca running...
> Reusing existing ksycoca

These are just informational messages.

> kcminit_startup: error while loading shared libraries:
> libkdeinit_kcminit_startup.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file
> or directory
> ksmserver: error while loading shared libraries: libkdeinit_ksmserver.so:
> cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

This is your real error. The missing file is part of kdebase, please make sure 
you have kdebase installed (not just kdebase-libs). Also check if you have the 
other KDE components you want installed (again, not just the -libs part).

I'll try explaining what probably happened, it's fairly technical though: We 
had some issues with splitting off -libs subpackages to avoid multilib 
conflicts (conflicts between the .i386.rpm and .x86_64.rpm packages on x86_64 
systems): to get rid of the i386 version of the main packages (which are no 
longer shipped, only -libs is multilibbed, i.e. available as both i386 and 
x86_64), we added an Obsoletes tag to the -libs package. However, what this 
ended up with is that the main package got completely removed, even the one for 
the main architecture, which of course is not what we wanted. This problem 
should be fixed in the current Fedora 8 updates though, so it should not happen 
again.

> startkde: Shutting down...
> klauncher: Exiting on signal 1
> ICE default IO error handler doing an exit(), pid = 17877, errno = 11
> startkde: Running shutdown scripts...
> startkde: Done.

And those are the consequences of it.

        Kevin Kofler