Mageia forum

Dear fellow Mageia community,

Recently, (this morning when I turned on my computer), I experienced a malfunction in mageia and am still experiencing it. Borders around applications have disappeared - by border I mean the tab at the top of each open window with icons such as [Close], [Maximise], [Minimise] etc. So I cannot move windows around like I normally would be able too so I am having to Ctrl+Q to quit applications. This is not the only problem. I have tried using konsole to resolve the problem from the help of similar threads: (https://forums.mageia.org/en/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=3109), (https://forums.mageia.org/en/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=6244), BUT I can't type anything into konsole, it simply just doesn't let me.

A few days ago I tried updating to mageia 4 but for whatever reason, this didn't work. (I did this from mageia 3). But, the system has been fine since now. I have tried restarting, logging in and out, turning off and on etc, but no luck. I also tried updating packages from the Mageia Control Centre but the rpmdb is down AGAIN - (for me I don't know why, but it happens a lot), and as I cannot type in konsole - I can't rebuild it.

All help is very much appreciated, thank you for reading.

-MrLigugu

mrligugu wrote:A few days ago I tried updating to mageia 4 but for whatever reason, this didn't work. (I did this from mageia 3).

And there was probably no output or no error messages, it just didn't work™ - right?

mrligugu wrote:I also tried updating packages from the Mageia Control Centre but the rpmdb is down AGAIN - (for me I don't know why, but it happens a lot), and as I cannot type in konsole - I can't rebuild it.

You can simply login via selecting failsafe mode in bootmenu and rebuild it.

Also, for your initial issue, it seems the windows manager is not running. Whcih desktop do you use? From your mentioning of konsole, let's assume KDE.
You can easily move away your KDE profile when in failsafe mode. On next login KDE will recreate it with default settings.

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cd /home/username
mv .kde/ .kde-old

Then reboot and login again. If you window decoration is still missing, your upgrade tries have probably borked your installation.
In that case I recommend https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Mageia_4_Rel ... to_Upgrade
or if that doesn't work then reinstall via the Mageia 4 DVD but keep your old /home partition.

So I ran the commands you said, the output for the second said that there was no such file or directory under kde-old.

BUT, when I shutdown my laptop, then turned it back on again, it said that there was a failure with kwin. Any ideas?

Thank you for replying - it means a lot. And yes when I was updating to mga4 there was an error code, but it was late and I didn't follow it up properly.

doktor5000 wrote:

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cd /home/username
mv .kde/ .kde-old

Little correction it's .kde4 not .kde.

Yep, it is - my bad.

So it would be

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cd /home/username
mv .kde4/ .kde4-old

Unfortunately, no such luck with the KDE command. All it has done is reset my preferences (like taskbar colour), window borders are not restored and the kwin error popped up again.

Again, thank you for all help!

Can you try to run

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kwin --replace

either in a terminal or via Alt+F2 ?

If that doesn't work, quoting previous post again:

doktor5000 wrote:If your window decoration is still missing, your upgrade tries have probably borked your installation.
In that case I recommend https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Mageia_4_Rel ... to_Upgrade
or if that doesn't work then reinstall via the Mageia 4 DVD but keep your old /home partition.

I will give that a go in failsafe mode, and report any issues.

I have attempted to update to mageia 4, with difficulty as the window borders are not appearing even in failsafe mode. I do not think that it was successful. Seriously considering abandoning mageia, as I have had many problems with it.

No make clean install mageia of 4,that's not any solution to fix problems in mageia that you move to another distro.