After today’s (2017/06/16) usual pacman -Syu & systemctl reboot the shit hit the fan. SDDM started up fine, but when I tried to login, nothing happened for a while until I got a nice X11-Widget right from the 80’s telling me that something “could not sync environment to dbus”. Yeah, sure! WTF!?
First stop: Google. I’m not the only one. For some reason I can’t just “startkde” any more, but have to use “dbus-launch startkde” in /usr/share/xsessions/plasma.desktop (that’s where SDDM gets the sessions from). Easy enough. KDE loads and seems to work, but it doesn’t really. Any connection attempt to the session bus fails: can’t connect to the ssh-agent even though it’s started, can’t do systemctl –user <something>, pulseaudio doesn’t work and so on… Craptastic!
Maybe it’s some cruft in ~/.config or ~/.session. Move both away, and just to make sure, ~/.cache, too. One swift reboot later it’s work… Fuck, same shit! While skimming through wiki-pages and forum-posts on my mobile, I read the suggestion to try a new user. OK, can’t hurt, can it?
Yes, it kinda can! Of course that works! Well, at least one way out. So, create a new user and port all settings there. Oh what fun! Well, I learned a lot of lessons, like:
- If you have an USB2 stick plugged in, entering the UEFI-Crap-Thingy what’s now called BIOS doesn’t work (or takes an eternity, maybe I didn’t wait long enough). At least it still boots if you don’t hit DEL or F2
- The ssh-agent.service for users is hand-crafted (or stolen from somewhere, I don’t remember). You must have $SSH_AUTH_SOCK set in your .bashrc (the latter is sourced by SDDM, BTW) to make it work.
- Sometimes it ain’t so bad to have Google accounts. After logging in with Chromium, my bookmarks and extensions were back almost immediately.
- To start a synergy Server, all you have to do is “systemctl –user enable synergys.service”, if you have a working config in /etc/synergys.conf. Starting the client is another beast, though…
- How to copy and modify the beet database (stored in $HOME/.config/beets/musiclib.blb in my case):
$ ~/.config/beets $ sqlite3 musiclib.blb SQLite version 3.19.3 2017-06-08 14:26:16 Enter ".help" for usage hints. sqlite> update items set path = replace(path, '<oldhome>', '<newhome>');
- You don’t have to fire up QtCreator if rdpk starts and exits immediately. If you tell xfreerdp to use pulseaudio and there’s no daemon running, it will do just that…
- For some reason, letting minidlnad reindex everything is much, much faster than letting it read the database on startup
- LibreOffice macros are stored in $HOME/.config/libreoffice/4/user/basic/Standard/Module1.xba for now. You can just copy that file to the new $HOME and have fun with it after restarting it
Maybe it was a good thing ™ to get rid of all the baggage, I don’t know… Sure enough, it happened on othalla, too 🙁