I just performed an upgrade of my Kubuntu installation from 12.10 to 13.04 and had problems with the starting KDE seesion: it wasn’t able to bring up dbus, asked if I were able to call qdbus and quit afterwards.
A short test on the command line calling qdbus brought up a strange error: the binary was there and could be called, but looked for another binary called qdbus in /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/qt4/bin/qdbus which wasn’t there. However, there was a binary called /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/qt4/bin/qdbus, and thus I realized that the i386 version of qdbus was installed, rather than the x86_64 version I needed. Thus the fix was easy:
apt-get install qdbus
The i386 version was automatically removed, the x86_64 bit version was installed, and KDE was able to start up properly.
/home/liquidat 
i had the same error on two of my machines. And in fact for both machines re-installing qdbus helped. Any idea what causes the i386 package to be installed over the amd64 version?
Andreas, no idea so far. I wasn’t even sure if I was the only one hit by the bug or not…
I filled a bug in launchpad like 1-2 months ago, but it seems it didn’t take the love it needed
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/qt4-x11/+bug/1155687
avlas, sad to see that the bug wasn’t fixed before the final release…
Really to bad!
As far as i see it, it only happens when updating from 12.10 to 13.04. Once 13.04 is installed and the qdbus is reinstalled the problem hasn’t surfaced again in my experience. Anyone, who has seen this error after the post-upgrade-fix?
I encountered the same problem, for me the it was necessary to install the qt4-default package to tell qtchooser to call the Qt4 qdbus instead of the nonexisting Qt5 one.
(I also had a ton of other issues related to old Gnome data in the profile that hang kded4 at session start *and* randomly later, but that’s another story)
Hm, interesting… I wonder why these problem around qdbus came up…
Thaaaaaaanks!
😀
You’re welcome!