But, I do not know how
> to start KDE from a console: Doing startx gives Gnome, which is not what I
> use.
IIRC it's startkde (or possibly start-kde, it's been a while).
This may be totally off the wall but I was recently unable to log on
via kdm after an upgrade and, to cut a long story short, it eventually
turned out to be a full root partition. (I imagine it would be
whichever partition /tmp lives in).
I'm not too sure what you mean. Are you saying that the root partition ( / ) was not properly formated when you upgraded?
I'm not 100% sure what the support position the the more exotic
facitilies of the recent chips is. Is this a hyperthreading chip or
multicore?
Hyperthreading. It's a Pentium four. I did much research and it seems that the P4 is quite capable of running an smp. In fact, I recently tried to use the non smp kernel I still have. It did freeze (but, in an odder fashion; it was thinking so much that I could only move the mouse sporadically. It was useless.) but it was far slower. So, the smp is deffinetly the kernel for me.
Hope this is of some help
Perhaps it has been. I shall try out the startkde or start-kde soon and tell you the results.
Thank you kindly.