about black screens and kde composition failure

[Guest]

Hello there!
Just yesterday I installed 32bit Kubuntu Desktop after my Windows died of viruses and lots of trash.
I managed to download and set up a bunch of software and it all worked surprisingly nice!

Then I played around a little with some customization of the desktop, the styles, nothing serious actually...
I think the last things i did was setting the background to a diashow and downloading mysql client+server.
All the trouble began when I rightclicked on the desktop and clicked(not the first time) on "Einstellungen für 'Aktivität Arbeitsfläche'", which translates to something like "settings for desktop activity" or the like.
Suddenly the screen went black, still all windows were open, but the taskbar, the background and all the widgets dissapeared...
I could still normally use the the open programs and after restart, it would look like always, but there was a strange window at startup now just containing a blank black screen, with a caption saying: "kblankscrn.kss".
Also, when logging off and in again, there appears a notification saying "the kde compositing has been deactivated by another application" or something along those lines. reactivating the compositing sometimes fails, sometimes not.
Also, the taskbar(how is it called in kubuntu..?) is not transparent anymore(i can actually set it to transparent again, but this seems to get reset after restart).
I've also had turned on this nice 3d-cube spinning effect for switching workspaces, but it didn't show up anymore.

Now i decided to install the ATI fglrx drivers, which was a fault.
Overall it seemed smoother before installing those, besides that my graphics card makes very loud noise!
This is what fglrxinfo gives me:
display: :0.0 screen: 0
OpenGL vendor string: ATI Technologies Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT
OpenGL version string: 3.2.9756 Compatibility Profile Context

I also tried to reset Kde by typing in this:
rm -rf /home/phil/.kde4
(no idea what this actually does)

Somehow I messed up the whole thing, and I'd like to reset the whole kde-thingy, the graphics driver to factory settings, or better: solve the problems...

Anyone an idea?

Thanks in forward =)


my pc:

32 bit intel core 2 duo
ati radeon hd 2900xt
2gb ram
Kubuntu is version 10. and something, where can i get exact version information of kubuntu, kde, grub etc?

Thanks


edit: now I uninstalled fglrx and am using the standart open radeon drivers again, which makes composition work, though I'd like to use 3d-hardware-acceleration which i think isn't supported for my graphics card by these drivers... Or is it? Are there alternatives? The black screen is still there...

[dibl]

Re: about black screens and kde composition failure

Sounds like you're having quite a learning experience there, Philly!

With so many "experiments" already done, it's hard to know what was broken in each case. Maybe the best thing is to boot into Recovery Console. From there (as root at the # prompt), I would try these:

rm -rf /home/phil/.kde

apt-get update

apt-get dist-upgrade

apt-get install --reinstall kubuntu-desktop

Then reboot the system and do a normal login. When you are logged in, you should see the default kde4 desktop.

[Guest]

Re: about black screens and kde composition failure

Hey, thanks for the reply.

Sounds like you're having quite a learning experience there, Philly!

Yeah, the whole linux thing is very hard at start, but you really get rewarded with full control and one nice running system once you get everything up and running(i hope xP).

I went to the console(ctrl alt f2?) and executed all commands...
for apt-get reinstall wasnt valid somehow so i made a "remove" first then "install" again.

But didn't change anything. After uninstalling fglrx, the compositing is activated again on system start, but after logging of and on, its deactivated and can only be reactivated by restarting.

Initially, the screen went black when trying to access the workspace settings, now there appears some really strange pseude desktop, wait, ive got an image...