KDE Problems

[phil1349]

I have been running kubuntu 8.04 with kde 3.5.9 since release no problem. Having a spare evening, I tried installing kde 4.1 to see what it was like. It installed no problem but I found it unstable, a bit of a resource hog and uninstalled it resolving to wait for final release of 8.1 when hopefully it will be fixed. I have also tried 8.1 alpha3 with kde 4.1 and it seems less of a problem than kde 4.1 on 8.04

The problem is that I have broken something, on startup the system goes to a text login but the x-server starts ok with "startx" although there is some instability that was not there before. Obviously I have deleted or corrupted a configuration file but I cannot find which one.

Can anyone point me in the right direction please.

Thanks in advance.

[dibl]

Re: KDE Problems

In your ~/home/phil folder are hidden files/folders that begin with a leading period. You can see them if, with Konqueror, you choose "View>show hidden" and check the box.

So, you want to rename the .kde folder and also the .kde4 folder, to something like .kde_bak and .kde4_bak. In all likelihood you won't ever need the old .kde4 one, but there might be some setting in the .kde folder that you'll want to retrieve.

Then log out and restart your system. Upon starting up again, it should run KDM automatically and offer you the "greeter" or GUI login screen. When you log in, you should get a pristine KDE 3.5.9 desktop, with all your custom settings gone. If so, you can re-do all your settings, and if you get desperate, you can open the previous .kde folder and maybe find the old settings lurking in there somewhere.

[phil1349]

Re: KDE Problems

Thanks for your advice Dibl, it seemed a logical approach but it unfortunately did not work - back to the text login.

I then had the (I thought a brilliant) idea of using a backup set no more than a week old and copying the .kde directory from that into my home directory to overwrite the obviously damaged existing directory.

There were a no. of error messages - cannot read this & cannot write that - & on boot up, blank screen. Something is badly broken.

Should I be thinking of copying specific files from the backup set to the home directory ?

[dibl]

Re: KDE Problems

I don't think the answer is copying files from the prior backup, unfortunately. Probably a more fruitful approach would be to study the log at /var/log/Xorg.0.log, after you try to log in and it won't go. What video chip do you have, and what driver are you using (or trying to)?

[mjtolsma]

Re: KDE Problems

I had the same problem, but with a different beginning.

Tell me, when you run startx, do you notice a "differend" kde environment. In my case, it was very noticable: I run the dutch version while with startx, I get the english one.

The solution for my problem was to switch to the vesa driver (of course it depends on your video card). It's been a while, but I believe it went as follows:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

But I advise you to make a backup of the xorg.conf file before you run the command.

After the command and the configuration, I got a good startup. Only had to install the correct drivers from the repositories, et voila.

[phil1349]

Re: KDE Problems

Thanks to Dibl and mjtolsma for their helpful comments.

Copying backup files to the home directory certainly restored all the settings etc. I examined the Xorg.0.log file which did not really give any clues, neither did the messages log file. There were no obvious error messages.

The video chip is a SiS 256E (although the motherboard handbook describes it as a 6256 & windoze reports it as a 6256) which is not the best video system I have ever had.

When starting from startx, kde started normally with no change of environment.

I finally fixed the problem with a re-install of the OS. This was fairly quick & painless as I preserved the /home partition and all is now back to normal. I will backup to a flash drive the important config files so that if I break it again, quite possible, it should be easier to fix.