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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.

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    On the machine (not ssh) do alt-F2 then kstart plasma-desktop Commented Jan 12, 2012 at 16:09

2 Answers 2

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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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  • "/etc/init.d/xdm restart" worked, but "startkde" gave an error message. Commented Jan 12, 2012 at 11:37
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Also you can do it without restarting whole X. Just export DISPLAY variable before your command to tell where is your X server and display:

export DISPLAY=:0

or what is your DISPLAY and then run your command. Or even just put variable before command:

DISPLAY=:0 kstart plasma-desktop

should work.

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