Slackware Startx Blank Screen Without Imobiledeviceglue

Blank screen kde plasma wayland on Slackware was the issue this time.

I had tried to run level 3 on slackware current kde plasma by invoking, as I had done before, startx on the system.

And with the most current slackware as of this writing, and after successfully upgrading the system, I was still unable to do so.

Some post dating back to 2019 https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/slackware-current-kde5-startx-failed-4175662813/ pointed to do an upgrade. Of which I had done. So this suggestion led nowhere.

After checking many of the issues as described on linuxquestions which resembled some of the behavior such as logging in through level 4 on sddm as this one pointed out https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/blank-screen-on-startx-for-kde-at-kernel-5-10-4-a-4175687833/page2.html

I couldn’t help but noticed that not only I was unable to log in through sddm but also a message that read the following:

The current theme can not be loaded due to the errors below, please select another theme:

file:///usr/share/sddm/themes/Breeze/Main.qml:14:1:plugin cannot be loaded for module "org.kde.plasma.core" cannot load library /usr/lib64/qt5/qml/org/kde/plasma/core" libcorebindingsplugin.so (libimobiledevice-glue-1.0.so.0 cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory)

This of course served no discernible help at all, as Google quickly confirmed, a search for bindingsplugin.so returned unrelated results while recently, as of today, a search on Google for <libcorebindingsplugin.so slackware> pointed out that the solution for the problem would be to slackpkg install-new. But for as long as I have updated the system on Slackware, with the kernel and packages, I have always foregone from invoking, even though is technically correct after a system upgrade, such command as slackpkg install-new.

By the time I had read that suggestion, which I noticed just now, as of this writing that it had been posted only a few days ago, I had already found, perhaps not as elegant, a solution on the system to invoke startx successfully.

Somehow while invoking kwin_wayland though startkwayland I noticed, unlike before, that was returning the error: /usr/bin/kwin_wayland: error while loading shared libraries: libimobiledevice-glue-1.0.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory which quickly identified the culprit.

For one given reason or another (which I don’t know), it seemed that the file for this shared library was not installed afterwards. Perhaps the file was not using the same repo as the repo that was being used during the system upgrade. And that is most likely the cause. imobiledevice-glue was using another repo, not the one used during the system upgrade.

After installing it with slackpkg install imobiledevice-glue kde plasma was successfully loaded with startx.