(initially posted on /r/KDE but stoked to see there’s a community here!)

I have a fairly new Debian KDE install - I’ve been tweaking and fixing things for the past week quite happily.

Was trying to fix the volume keys not working this evening. Logged into TTY2 and ran showkey --scancodes and showkey --keycodes per a forum post in an attempt to diagnose and fix. When I hit ctrl+alt+F7 to get back to my session, it was back at the login screen, as if I’d typed my password (ie dots entered for password and greyed out as if I’d then hit enter)

And there it stayed.

Reboot brings me to login, type password (fingerprint reader no longer registers) and there it hangs again.

I can log in just fine through the console (incidentally, the fingerprint reader works just fine there). startx will then happily run a gui from there with full access to my files. I’ve also created a new user via console and I can log in graphically just fine via that one too.

But my main user login remains stubbornly broken. Any ideas on what’s happened?

  • mox
    5•15 days ago

    I use KDE on Debian. I have not encountered this, nor can I think of a reason why showkey would break a user’s desktop session.

    If the GUI login screen is still visible when it hangs, I suppose sddm might be having trouble. To investigate, I would run journalctl -f in a text console, and maybe tail -F /var/log/Xorg.0.log* in another, while attempting a GUI login. When it hangs, I would switch back to the text consoles and see if the most recent log messages hint at what’s hanging.

    *(Or whichever log file corresponds to the new X session, assuming you’re using Xorg instead of Wayland.)

    Could the fingerprint reader be causing the problem on the main account?

    • @AxisentialOP
      2•15 days ago

      Thanks. I’ll check out disabling the fingerprint reader and see if that makes a difference. Will do those investigations you’ve suggest too. But at this point it’s looking like moving my user data and starting again on a new login.

      • mox
        2•15 days ago

        Another thought: Is it possible that your original user account (which hangs) is trying to log in to an X session while the new one (which works) is using a Wayland session, or vice-versa? That might explain the difference in behavior if only one of the two session types is broken.

        Good luck!

        • @AxisentialOP
          1•15 days ago

          Yes, I’d considered that too. Alas, not the case

  • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppetEnglish
    3•15 days ago

    It sounds like you messed up the key binding for the enter key and fingerprint scanner. Boot to a live CD, mount your partition, chroot into the OS, delete your changes to whatever file that process you ran uses. You can try just deleting the file and reinstalling defaults if you can find a command that reinitializes it!.

  • @[email protected]English
    1•14 days ago

    If startx and everything else works fine, my guess is that sddm or whatever login manager you’re using is messed up. Maybe reinstall/reset its configuration files and go from there.