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    #1

    Booting till X-windows' black screen - no KDE, not responding

    Dear fellow Kubuntians,

    After a month of happily using Feisty, suddenly it goes wrong.

    Booting goes till the black screen with the x shaped cursor of X-windows, then totally black and then the x-shaped cursor reappears, then black etc etc. Guessing with the little knowledge of linux I have that X-windows is starting and crashing over and over and over...

    ctrl+alt+F1 doesn't do anything

    I have tried recovery modes, also of previous kernels. At some point I can
    1) give my root password
    2) continue with control d
    Control D didn't resolve the issue...

    This : tail -f /var/log/Xorg.0.log
    Resulted in :

    Error opening /dev/wacom: No such file or directory
    (EE) xf86OpenSerial : cannot open device /dev/wacom
    no such file or directory
    Error opening /dev/wacom : No such file or directory
    (EE) xf86OpenSerial : cannot open device /dev/wacom
    no such file or directory
    Error opening /dev/wacom: No such file or directory
    (II) configured Mouse: ps2EnableDataReporting: succeeded
    Could not init font patch element /usr/share/fonts/X11/Cyrillic, removing from list!
    Could not init font patch element /usr/share/fonts/X11/Type1, removing from list!


    Thanks very much in advance, your help is greatly appreciated !

    Cheerrrrrrssssss
    Tags: None
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    #2
    Re: Booting till X-windows' black screen - no KDE, not responding

    Please, has no-one got an idea?
    Pretty desperate here!

    Thanks in advance
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      #3
      Re: Booting till X-windows' black screen - no KDE, not responding

      The message errors are "normal" and shouldn't make X reset AFAIK.

      The only tips that I can give you are:

      - Boot in safemode and type startx. See if X starts or some message error appears.
      - Maybe X is working nice and it's a KDE problem. Try to change the "session type" on the login screen. Or add another user to the system and try to log with it.
      - Try to boot from a livecd, that you know that it works, to discard a possible hardware failure.

      I'm sorry, but this is as helpful as I can be .

      Javier.
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        #4
        Re: Booting till X-windows' black screen - no KDE, not responding

        Thank you javierrivera

        - hardware is fine, I have a dualboot with XP, which I am now using to type this :-)
        - session type : I use the unsafe method of automatically boot into the user, not sure how to add another user...

        - Your startx command did quite a lot.
        It brought me to an empty KDE desktop - fully working so it seems - as one finds just after a clean installation of kubuntu feisty. All my settings/files etc were gone, but I was ROOT@COMPUTER and not USER@COMPUTER... When logging off I was only allowed to log off and not change to another user.

        I failed to locate my own directory ~/ didn't contain my userdir

        Is all my work gone now ? :-(

        Again your help is very much appreciated!
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          #5
          Re: Booting till X-windows' black screen - no KDE, not responding

          Your user dir should be in /home/username. The root user is a special case, when the dir is in /root. If /home/username is missing, then yes, you lost everything. But it will be quite strange.

          The first thing to do is see if /home/ exists. And what dirs are inside.

          If it doesn't, is it a different partition?.

          If it does, everything is right. There are two things that I'd try:

          a) Log-in as root (using the startx method), navigate to /home/username. Here there should be hidden folder called .kde, rename it. Restart and try to log as the user. You will loose all your settings, and the data of some kde programs like kmail (if you use it). The .kde directory will be recreated. You can now regain data and settings by copying thins back from the old .kde (now renamed) and the new .kde.

          b) Log-in as root, create a new user, add it to the admin group. Now move the data that you need from your old user dir to the new one. Take a look for hidden folder, as lots of data are there (like Thunderbird settings).

          Hope that it helps.

          Javier.
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            #6
            Re: Booting till X-windows' black screen - no KDE, not responding

            Dear JavierRivera, thanks very much.

            I found my dir and all seems intact.
            the .kde dir is there as well - from what I understand from your useful help is that the problem is somewhere withing that directory... ? !
            Isn't there a way to locate that problem?

            If not leaning to your option b)
            I am (or was :-) the only user (automatic log-in) on this computer. So if there is a user group (not sure), I was the only member.

            Could you tell me how to add a second user via the commandline to my group. Or will it be possible via that root-desktop; System>Administration>Users and Groups ?

            Will user2 be able to copy or even write the user1 files?

            Thanks so much !
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              #7
              Re: Booting till X-windows' black screen - no KDE, not responding

              Originally posted by Oceanic
              I found my dir and all seems intact.
              the .kde dir is there as well - from what I understand from your useful help is that the problem is somewhere withing that directory... ? !
              Isn't there a way to locate that problem?
              Yes, the problem is likely inside. It stores all the configuration information about KDE. It's kinda windows registry.

              The easiest way that I know is rename it, log in, let kubuntu create a new one. After that start copying folders back until the problem appears again .

              If not leaning to your option b)
              I'm leaning to a).

              I am (or was :-) the only user (automatic log-in) on this computer. So if there is a user group (not sure), I was the only member.
              Linux uses the groups as a kind of "fine grain" security. Your user belongs to many groups, and this is what defines what he is able to do.

              In my computer my user belongs to the following groups: adm, dialout, cdrom, floppy, audio, dip, video, plugdev, lpadmin, scannner, admin, vboxusers

              For example, only members of the admin group can act as root (add users or change groups), only members of the scanner group can use a scaner, only members of the plugdev group can use external devices, etc...

              Code:
              Could you tell me how to add a second user via the commandline to my group. Or will it be possible via that root-desktop; System>Administration>Users and Groups ?
              It will be easier to use the Administration tool, as you will be able to create the user and add groups from the same place. You will need to know a couple of commands, IRRC, useradd, adduser, passwd at least.

              Code:
              Will user2 be able to copy or even write the user1 files?
              Of course no . You will need to sudo to do that.

              Still leaning to b) ? .

              Javier.
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                #8
                Re: Booting till X-windows' black screen - no KDE, not responding

                Superb Javier,

                I will try your method (surely option A of course :-) tonight.

                Update will follow.

                Thanks again !
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                  #9
                  Re: Booting till X-windows' black screen - no KDE, not responding

                  Javier,

                  Thanks very much for all your help, it is solved now.

                  The problem was actually lack of memory of the partition where /home/user was.
                  Deleting some very large back-up files/dirs gave me enough space.

                  Note that Kubuntu didn't warn me - would be a nice and friendly addition for the end-users that are used to M$ Windows...

                  Something like "Warning: 99% of harddisk space is used"


                  Anyway, a big cheers for taking the time to tackle this problem and teaching me a thing or two.

                  Oceanic
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