Akonadi is not starting, refuses to run as root (Slackware 13.0/13.1/13.37/current installation).

Well, I am having fun lately with the latest incarnation of the Slackware Linux distribution. Like I said before I am a slacker, and I like Slackware a lot. In a way it’s nice that some things don’t work out of the box. You get to know how they work.

Well, after my first startx I was greeted by a message stating that Akonadi failed to start / Akonadi fails to start. I had a hunch that it’s missing his Mysql friend. I configured mysql as explained here and restarted KDE. It still didn’t work, but I was on the right track.

I opened an xterm and ran:

mysqladmin create akonadi -p

hoping that it will help. Well, it didn’t fix it either. The message informing that Akonadi fails to start also has an error log. Clicking on it I discovered that the problems were still Mysql related. So I went into Akonadi configuration, changed the setting from local mysql (accessed through a socket) to server mode, typing in localhost, and an user and a password.

That fixed it !

UPDATE:

Akonadi, in it’s default configuration runs an internal mysql server which by default does not allow to be ran as root. Now this is all nice and well but I run my workstation as root. Yes, yes I know, but I still want to, my workstation, my rules. So here’s how:

Edit ~/.local/share/akonadi/mysql.conf and add

user=root

to it. (you can choose any user as which this mysql instance will run but I really lost too much time with this nonsense already to bother)

I know, I know, you should not run as root and everything but it’s my machine and I’ll run as whatever damn user I want.

I also think that typing the correct path to the mysql socket would help too.

Have fun