no desktop after log in (SOLVED?)

[aimar]

Hi,

I have installed jaunty in an airis linx NB620 P4. It has very low RAM, so the installation was made by an Alternate CD.

I had some problems to boot, because after splash the screen went black. Solved it writing in /boot/grub/menu.lst in the correspondent kernel line: "vga=normal".

my problem is that after log in correctly, the wallpaper remains the same, I have no desktop, no icons, no panels, and so on, nothing. But it works by Ctrl+F1 or Ctrl+F2, and the software goes OK, although I have to resize each window I open, because they are very small at first.

perhaps is a driver problem, but don't know which hardware and so, which driver should I installed.

thanks everybody.

[GreyGeek]

Re: no desktop after log in

Kubuntu (Jaunty or Karmic) may require more RAM than your machine provides to run adequately, if at all.

You might try Xbuntu, which uses a very light xserver designed to run on machines with low amounts of memory,

Or, you might want to give Puppy Linux 4.2.1 a try. I recently installed it on an 8 year old emachine that had only 200 or so MB of RAM, and it ran very well, giving a very good display and was very snappy for an 800 MHz box.

[aimar]

Re: no desktop after log in

so the problem is that desktop doesn't load because the RAM?
I ran memtest and found hundred of errors.
Could be ...
so, that my RAM is death and after installing new memory sticks it would run properly?
thank you.

[GreyGeek]

Re: no desktop after log in

mmm... you didn't mention any RAM test errors. That would definitely be a problem that will prevent an application which uses large amounts of memory from running, or even small applications if they were placed into a region of memory that was defective.

Looking at the specs of your box from Internet reviews, it looks like the maximum RAM your box can hold is 512MB. It has either a P4 2.8 or a 3.06 GHz single CPU. A P4 is considered OLD and SLOW by current standards, but you box may have been ahead of its time offering a 2 or 3 GHz CPU.

The minimum system requirements for a desktop installation are a 300 MHz x86 processor, 64 MB of RAM, 4 GB of hard drive space,[29] and a video card which supports VGA at 640x480 resolution. The recommended system requirements for the desktop installation are a 700 MHz x86 processor, 384 MB of RAM, 8 GB of hard drive space,[29] and a video card which supports VGA at 1024×768 resolution.

Your box has the "recommended" equipment so Kubuntu Jaunty or Karmic should run at a acceptable speed. Since even if you upgrade to 512MB of RAM your "memory" will be on the slow side I would partition off a 1GB swap partition when you install Kubuntu.

Also, since we are only a month away from the release of Kubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala, you may want to hold off till it is released, on Oct 22nd, and install it. Otherwise, if you install Kubuntu 9.04 Jaunty right now you will be faced with hundreds of MB of updates to download. In my opinion, it would be better to wait until Karmic is released. If you have technical abilities you may want to install the current daily of Karmic. As it updates it will become equal to and the same as the version to be released on Oct 22nd. The choice is yours.