grey & white checkboard, no menus, icons, or hotkeys??

[sbalfour]

I'm on Kubuntu 8.10. My screen shows a checkboard of small grey and white squares. There are
no icons, taskbar, panels, nothing at all. Left click and right click nothing happens. Alt-f2 brings
up a command line, but commands such as "xterm" appear to be ignored. What can I do here?
Telnet into the machine shows stuff like firefox and other apps still running, but how do I make them
show? The last thing I iconized was firefox, and it disappeared, as did everything else, one by one.
Rebooting brings back a completely blank grey & white checkerboard. I'd like to make it look like
it was when I initially installed the OS: ther was a squiggly blue background (oxygen?), a taskbar,
a panel, KDE menu icon in lower left, home icon, etc.

Stuart

[sithlord48]

Re: grey & white checkboard, no menus, icons, or hotkeys??

ok one of two things...
1.plasma is not running. so run it w/ alt+f2 (command == plasma)
or
2. plasma is having issues on your machine (possibly your recent changes broke it) if you removing the file ~/.kde/share/config/plasmarc or ~/.kde/share/config/plasma-desktoprc (not sure what one it is, might be both). removal will set plasma back to default as it was when you first installed kubuntu.

[sbalfour]

Re: grey & white checkboard, no menus, icons, or hotkeys??

I found /usr/bin/plasma running. The plasmarc file was empty, but I removed it anyway, killed and
restarted plasma, and the screen is now black. Mouse clicks do nothing, and no icons, panels or
taskbar has appeared. xterm is named "konsole" apparently, so I can set $DISPLAY, execute konsole
over telnet and an xterm window appeared on the local screen. Now what? How do I get Firefox (and my other apps) which are running, to appear in the UI? I tried iconizing the xterm I had, and it
disappeared again (though the process is still running), so I start another.

Stuart

[sithlord48]

Re: grey & white checkboard, no menus, icons, or hotkeys??

what about that plasma-desktoprc file is that also empty. ? on my machine i also find i have 'plasma-desktop' running (note:i am using kde 4.3beta2, so it could be a new thing)

[sbalfour]

Re: grey & white checkboard, no menus, icons, or hotkeys??

A search from "/" as root finds neither plasma-desktoprc nor plasma-desktop files.
(obviously, no plasma-desktop process is running). ls /usr/bin/plasma* shows:

/usr/bin/plasma /usr/bin/plasmaengineexplorer /usr/bin/plasmapkg

I also goobered doing alt-f2 to bring up a command line to start another xterm,
and hit ctrl-f2 instead, and my existing xterm disappeared!! It's very unnerving
how kubuntu just disappears everything. That xterm (konsole, duh) is still running,
so where did it go?

Stuart

[sithlord48]

Re: grey & white checkboard, no menus, icons, or hotkeys??

very strange indeed. what did you do to make is so angry at you?

perhaps it is time to do a reinstall of the kubuntu-desktop package. this might correct any issues that might have come up. i have heard that deleting your ~/.kde folder will set kde back to default but i have never tried it ...

[doctordruidphd]

Re: grey & white checkboard, no menus, icons, or hotkeys??

i have heard that deleting your ~/.kde folder will set kde back to default but i have never tried it ...

An alternative is to rename the .kde folder, so you won't lose any data stored there.

mv .kde .kde-backup

Have you made any changes to your video drivers? If you have proprietary drivers installed, did you do a kernel update without reinstalling them?

Another thing to try is to start up in recovery mode, and choose "attempt to repair graphics".

[Guest]

Re: grey & white checkboard, no menus, icons, or hotkeys??

Same problem with a completely fresh install of KDE 4.3 with Neon on Jaunty. Rename the kde-neon directory, the problem still occurs.

Edit : corrected as of today with the update of kde-nightly-qt

[mierdatuti]

Re: grey & white checkboard, no menus, icons, or hotkeys??

I'm on Kubuntu 8.10. My screen shows a checkboard of small grey and white squares. There are
no icons, taskbar, panels, nothing at all. Left click and right click nothing happens. Alt-f2 brings
up a command line, but commands such as "xterm" appear to be ignored. What can I do here?
Telnet into the machine shows stuff like firefox and other apps still running, but how do I make them
show? The last thing I iconized was firefox, and it disappeared, as did everything else, one by one.
Rebooting brings back a completely blank grey & white checkerboard. I'd like to make it look like
it was when I initially installed the OS: ther was a squiggly blue background (oxygen?), a taskbar,
a panel, KDE menu icon in lower left, home icon, etc.

Stuart

Hi!

I have the same problem!
Did you solved?
Many thanks and sorry for my english!