[Bug 50014] KDM makes KDE startup troubleshooting difficult

[anthill]

Public bug reported:

Recently I manually extracted a .deb with apt-get into the /tmp
directory.  Apparently this had a side effect of quietly changing the
permissions of the /tmp folder to 0755.  This prevented KDE from writing
session data on startup, causing it to silently crash.

The symptoms of the problem were not very straightforward.  My Kubuntu
6.06 system would start up normally to the KDM login screen, but no
matter which session I chose, pressing the 'login' button resulted in a
blank screen, a cursor flicker, and then a return right back to KDM.  No
error message, no console log, nothing.

Using GDM was more helpful, after the blank screen and flicker, when GDM
reappeared it showed a dialog box explaining "Your X session was shorter
than 10 seconds, etc. etc." and giving me some sort of explanation for
this strange behavior.

I would suggest that KDM needs a similar feature to GDM, preferably
capturing any console output from window manager startups and providing
an option to examine it when returning from a  WM startup crash.

** Affects: kdebase (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Untriaged
         Status: Unconfirmed

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KDM makes KDE startup troubleshooting difficult
https://launchpad.net/bugs/50014