Ssh – How to start plasma-desktop from SSH-console on desktop session

kdelinuxopensusesshtty

I killed KDE's plasma-desktop on a openSUSE 11.2 machine, because it was eating too much CPU. How can I restart it via SSH or another tty session? On the affected computer there is only shown a blinking cursor on the screen, but I cannot type anything.

If I try "kstart plasma-desktop" over SSH the error message of course is "kstart: cannot connect to X server", because I haven't enabled X11-forwarding. But nevertheless "kstart plasma-desktop" is not the completely correct, because I want to start plasma-desktop on a desktop session and not over SSH on my computer.

Best Answer

If you see a blinking cursor that means you're on the wrong vty or the X server isn't running at all. Killing plasma-desktop probably took it down with it. plasma-desktop obviously needs an X server to connect to, so try restarting your X server. One of these should work:

/etc/init.d/kdm restart
/etc/init.d/xdm restart
/etc/init.d/?dm restart
startkde (If you're not using a login manager)

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SSH – How to launch gnome-terminal remotely on the headless server? (fails to launch over X11 forwarding)

That doesn't work because gnome-terminal (like any other gnome-thing) will try to connect to dbus and fail after not receiving a response for a long while.

The easiest work-around is just to start a dbus instance for your session:

export $(dbus-launch)
gnome-terminal

If you started a Wayland session on the remote machine since you have first run the export $(dbus-launch), you'll have to run it again, or if not gnome-terminal will start a Wayland instance of gnome-terminal on the remote display instead of an X11 one on your forwarded display.

Another workaround in this case is to explicitly run an X11 gnome-terminal-server which will terminate after the last window using it had closed. Example:

#! /bin/bash
ID=foo.bar$RANDOM
GDK_BACKEND=x11 /usr/libexec/gnome-terminal-server --app-id "$ID" &
sleep .4        # yuck
gnome-terminal --app-id "$ID"
wait

Best Answer

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