Fwd: Urgently help needed to get restarted with Kontact @ Kubuntu 14.04/ KDE 4.13.3.

[Bas G. Roufs]

Hello Nils and Everybody.

Thanks Nils for your suggestions after my message of yesterday:

> > Kontact worked quite well till a few hours ago; at that moment, a big
> > update seemed to mess everything up...... <snip>
> > However, nothing works any more. All I get, is the an
> > error report starting with the phrase "The Akonadi personal
> > information system is not running.....". ...<snip>

With one phrase from you, Nils, I agree wholeheartedly.....
> Same here - the update of mysql is the culprit. 


No doubt, such a solution may work for now:

> I installed the previous  version and Kmail started again. 

However, I am not sure whether such a downgrade is structural solution you can 
keep relying on. On the other hand, when Googling this morning the phrase "The 
Akonadi personal information system is not running....." , I stumbled upon two 
bug reports that together brought more clarity in the issue. 
Look at this report:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/akonadi/+bug/1448345
It's also worth looking at this "duplicate":
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/akonadi/+bug/1445383

They key issue is that "mysql" has to be replaced by a "fork": "mariadb".

I have done this as follows. 

I checked first which version I had from "mysql-server-core" and "mysql-client-
core"; it was version 5.5. in my case.

A second step was this command line command:

<snip...>

sudo apt-get purge mysql-server-core-5.5 mysql-client-core-5.5

<snip...>

After hitting the enter-button, I got a whole  bunch of technical texts, 
amongst which this:

<snip...>

The following extra packages will be installed:
  libmariadbclient18 mariadb-client-core-5.5 mariadb-common
  mariadb-server-core-5.5
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  mysql-client-core-5.5* mysql-server-core-5.5*
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  libmariadbclient18 mariadb-client-core-5.5 mariadb-common
  mariadb-server-core-5.5
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  libmariadbclient18 mariadb-client-core-5.5 mariadb-common
  mariadb-server-core-5.5
0 upgraded, 4 newly installed, 2 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 4,884 kB of archives.
After this operation, 1,672 kB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y

<snip...>

Of course, I have entered "y", to confirm this action. 

Now, I can access again KMail and most of the other parts of Kontact. I can 
access again the draft mail I talked about yesterday. 

One part of Kontact is still a problem: "Akregator", the feeds. This issue I 
will deal with in another thread.

Thanks, yours,
Bas.







-- 


Bas G. Roufs
Utrecht, NL, EU.
E.: BasRoufs at gmail.com; M./SMS: +31 6 446 835 10.