Re: plasmashell not starting
Reply #14 –
For anyone equally screwed as I was:
On boot, in GRUB, highlight your Artix entry and press e to edit the boot line.
Find the row that begins with "linux" and append init=/bin/sh at the end to drop to shell on boot.
Press Ctrl+X to boot.
If that shell is functional for you, run an upgrade to salvage your system.
In my case, I have multiple partitions and those weren't mounted, so the shell wasn't a good one.
In that case, cd /etc/xdg/autostart/ and use the editor of your choice (or echo/cat, strings and >>) to create a new file "emergency-terminal.desktop" with the following contents:
[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=Autostart Terminal for Emergencies
TryExec=xterm
Exec=xterm
StartupNotify=false
X-GNOME-Autostart-Phase=Initialization
X-KDE-autostart-phase=1
Reboot the system.
In my shell, even the reboot was f*cked - if you have magic enabled, you can do echo _reisub > /proc/sysrq-trigger
to trigger the reboot via shell. Otherwise: Power/Reset button.
Let it boot normally and log in at the Plasma login.
It will still be broken, but there should now be a terminal that autostarted on login.
Since you booted and logged in properly, this terminal will be in a coherent state and you can use it to upgrade the system as normal/as directed in previous posts in this thread.
Reboot again after the upgrade, and Plasma should be working again.
Since the terminal will come up again anyway, go ahead and
sudo mv /etc/xdg/autostart/emergency-terminal.desktop /etc/xdg/autostart/emergency-terminal.bak
That should disable the autostart, according to the Internet. I haven't rebooted since, so I haven't verified that.
If it still comes up, just delete the file.