It took me a while, but I finally figured out that in spite of installing "ekos-debugger" you have to run "ekosdebugger" As soon as I hit "Connect" in ekos a small pop-up fired and instantly disappeared as all the kstars windows closed. I started kstars from the "KStars" tab within the debugger, but also got the same result when starting it from the linux app menu ekosdebug output attached: