Re: KDE peculiarities and questions
Kent West wrote:
> Ken Heard wrote:
>> I have KDE installed on all three of the boxes my spouse and I use. The
>> box with Sarge installed, a P4 desktop, uses KDE 3.3.?; whereas the
>> other two, one a P3 desktop and the other a P2 Tecra 8000 Toshiba
>> laptop, have Etch, which uses KDE 3.5.5. The latter has some nice new
>> features, but I have also run into four peculiarities.
>>
>> 1. On the P3 desktop only, the panel displays the taskbar three times.
>> Once is surely enough. I tried to fix it by purging KDE and
>> reinstalling it, to no avail. Any ideas on what I can do to remove this
>> redundancy?
>>
>
> Does this happen for all users, or just one user?
>
> If just one user, I'd rename the ~/.kde? directory for that user and
> restart KDE.
I only have one user so far on this particular desktop computer. In
any event it was Ben Breslauer who showed me the way on question 1. I
had not realized that the taskbar was an applet. I somehow got the idea
that it was integral to the panel; probably because one is on the panel
by default, I think. I had installed other applets on the panel; I must
have inadvertently installed two more taskbars in addition to the
default one. It was easy to remove the two redundant ones once I knew
how they got there.
>> 3. On both the laptop and desktop I seem to be stuck with the Gnome
>> login manager. Selecting options in the System Administration>Login
>> Manager of the KDE control manager are not implemented. Is there file
>> somewhere I can substitute the KDE login manager for the Gnome one?
>
> Try "aptitude install kdm" and/or "dpkg-reconfigure kdm". Or "aptitude
> purge gdm".
>
>> I
>> have already made kdm the default display manager.
>>
>
> Which is what the above commands should allow you to do. How did you
> accomplish this? In the KDE Control Panel stuff?
The behavour described in my questions two and three may be due to the
same cause. I think that if gdm, and possibly other parts of the Gnome
desktop environment, remain unpurged from a box where KDE is preferred,
some Gnome applications override their KDE counterparts. On my laptop I
had purged all Gnome apps and I think that only after the purge was I
able to use other mouse cursor themes rather than the one Gnome
mandates. On the laptop however I was still presented with the Gnome
login manager rather than KDE's; it had that Gnomial look about it.
I say "I think" because since my laptop gui hung I have been unable to
use it. I am consequently reluctant to experiment further on the
computer I had hurriedly to install Etch RC1 on so that I could have
one computer at least operational.
I had described the problem with the laptop in another post I made to
the list yesterday. Unfortunately nobody has (yet?) answered it. I
hope somebody does, as I am really screwed up if I cannot get at least
the laptop working SOON. I have copied that post below.
Regards and thanks,
Ken Heard
Toronto
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A few weeks ago I installed Etch RC1 on a Toshiba Tecra 8000 P2 laptop.
The installation itself went without hitch, and I set about customizing
it to my taste and installing various applications. For example I
replaced Gnome with KDE, as I had been using KDE since I converted to
Linux and don't want at this stage to lean a new desktop environment.
Then, on 6 February -- completely out of the blue -- I booted the
computer, which I had set to log on automatically to my user. Instead
however of seeing the KDE desktop, I got an xterm screen, which I
assumed was a fail-safe xterm session. When I tried to use it, it did
not respond; the machine hung. I was however able to log in, both as
root and my user, on the ordinary terminals, ctl-alt-F1 to F6.
It seems to me that the xserver-xorg is broken somehow. I tried
aptitude from the command line but could find no broken packages. The
only configuration option I know about is "dkpg-reconfigure
xserver-xorg" which was of no help.
Another change I noticed that on this fatal boot-up, both the
avahi-daemon, whatever that is, and the HP linux printing and imaging
system failed to load.
To make matters worse, an hour later I booted my desktop and met
with the same result: a fail-safe terminal emulator and a hung machine.
This failure happened to a P4 box on which I had installed Sarge and KDE
in June 2005 when Sarge first came out. Other than a few glitches
encountered on initial installation, it has worked perfectly ever since.
In this case I was also able to access the box from a native terminal,
and so was able to write to zip750 disks all my document files.
Again I used aptitude from the command line and also found no broken
packages, this time the x-server being xfree86 rather than xorg. I did
however discover that aptitude wanted to upgrade xserver-xfree86 to
xserver-xfree86-dbg and also upgrade some of the dependencies. Two
lines of the syslog read as follows:
Feb 8 09:04:41 localhost kdm_greet[2943]: Can't open default user face
Feb 8 09:04:47 localhost kdm: :0[2948]: Session
"/etc/kde3/kdm/Xsession" execution failed: Permission denied
Unfortunately however I was unable to do any upgrades, because on this
boot-up the the operating system -- for the first time ever -- was
unable to connect to the LAN.
As always, the NIC was detected and the driver installed. It could not
connect to the network. The system tried to connect to the network five
times, each time reporting "Network is down", when I knew it was not.
My first instinct was to check the hardware. The card was properly
seated in the mainboard, and all the cables and connections worked with
another computer and the print server. I swapped the NIC with another
one of the same make and model from another desktop. The one swapped to
that other desktop worked. The desktop previously reporting "network is
down" still so reports with the swapped NIC which had worked before in
the other desktop.
The LAN, by the way, is restricted to our residence where only two
desktops, one laptop, a print server and a gateway-switch are connected
to it. This installation is only ever used by my spouse and me.
It is particularly serious that both my previously operational computers
failed at the same time. Fortunately I had a third desktop, on which no
operating system had been installed. My first task was to install Etch
RC1 on it so I had access to the web and could send and receive e-mails
and install my document files on it. The necessity to make these
installations accounts for the delay in reporting my problem to the
Debian user list.
My first priority is to get the laptop with Etch on it working again, as
I am departing a week hence on an extended trip where I will need it.
But I would like to get the desktop with Sarge working again too. I
will be grateful to anybody who can tell me how to do so.
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