No Video After Choosing Sharpen Desktop

[Guest]

Trying Kubuntu (8.10) for the first time on a Dell PowerEdge 2300 server I was given and was finally able to get it installed after four days (not going into it). Anyway, was playing around with the desktop setting tonight and clicked the option to sharpen the desktop. Now the only thing visible is the mouse pointer. Everything is fine until the login point. After I enter my password I get nothing else. I'm sure there is some simple way to remove this option but since I'm a newbie I don't have a clue yet. Also, can anyone recommend a good website to introduce the newbie to Kubuntu (other than reading through all the forums)? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

[HavocXphere]

Re: No Video After Choosing Sharpen Desktop

Disabling Desktop Effects when KDE doesn't start:

At the login window, select the Menu button at the bottom right of the screen. Then select Console login.

Type in you username. Hit enter. Type in your password (It won't show anything, not even *'s) Hit enter.

Make a backup of the file we are editing:

cp ~/.kde/share/config/kwinrc ~/.kde/share/config/kwinrc_backup

Open a text editor to view the file:

nano ~/.kde/share/config/kwinrc

Find this section:

[Compositing]
Backend=OpenGL
Enabled=true
GLDirect=true
GLMode=TFP
GLTextureFilter=1
GLVSync=false
HiddenPreviews=0
XRenderSmoothScale=false

change the Enabled=true to Enabled=false.

Press ctrl-O to write the changes to disk. Hit enter to confirm.
Press ctrl-X to exit the text editor (nano).

Type startx to start to get back to the login screen.

• Please note that not might load everything 100%. E.g. On my PC it doesn't initialize audio correctly after doing the console login+startx thing. Just restart the PC to fix this.
  
• If the the permissions on the kwinrc files are wrong (The file should belong to you, not root), then you might have to put "sudo " in front of the cp and nano command. sudo = Super User Do, i.e. do with admin rights.
• The dot in /.kde/ indicates that it is a hidden folder, so it won't show in dolphin or with the ls command.
• If you upgrade from kde3->kde4 then the path *might* be /.kde4/ instead of /.kde/

You can also disable individual effects this way...a bit further down in the file there is a list with all the effects.

Hope this helps.

[Guest]

Re: No Video After Choosing Sharpen Desktop

Unfortunately the fix as listed didn't quite work, however, the information you gave me did allow me to delete the file (or at least erase the contents). I'm sure that's not the best thing to do but it did allow me into KDE and seems to be functioning just fine. I really appreciate your assistance. Thanks.

[HavocXphere]

Re: No Video After Choosing Sharpen Desktop

Unfortunately the fix as listed didn't quite work

Which part is that...so that I can fix it.