KDE problem: blank screen upon login

gwion

I installed KDE several times on a number of boxes and it never was a problem. However when I did yesterday things were weird: when I log into KDE I get the configuration wizzard and everything and then the bootsplash. When this finishes there is just a blank screen, no icons, no taskbar, just the mousepointer. Klicking anywhere with the mouse does not have any effect.

I deleted my config files several times. XFCE4 and Fluxbox work nicely btw and from within fluxbox I can start konqueror as well.

I looked through most of the somehow related threads on this forum but somehow I could not get a grip on this problem. Has anyone seen something like this before?

Many thanks for your help!!

Gwion
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mikegpitt · Advocate Joined: 22 May 2004 Posts: 3224

I'm having similar problems. I never had problems emerging kde before, but on a system I'm doing this week everythign wont work. I had the same problem as you. I start kde, everything crashes and then all I have is a blank screen with mouse cursor. I reinstalled the system from scratch again, and now kde jsut crashes on start.

You can read my post here:
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=200894

Next move for me, unless someone has advice, is to recompile KDE and maybe xfree. As it was I was using the binary packages from the 2004.1 cds.

grooveman · Veteran Joined: 24 Feb 2003 Posts: 1217

Things you can check:

1) does the user in question have rw rights to his/her home directory and all the contents of .kde?

2) Does the homedirectory even exist? (In gentoo if you don't use the -m switch to useradd, you don't make a homedir for him).

3)Does the user in question have a quota, and is that quota met or exceded?

If you think that all of these are okay, try mving his .kde3 dir to .kde3_old and let kde generate a new one. Also, go into the tempdir and delete (or mv) all files and directories owned by that user.

My experience has been that when things like this happen, kde has nowhere to write to due to permissions or missing directories.

Hope that helps.

G
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gwion · Posted: Thu Jul 22, 2004 12:31 pm Post subject:

grooveman · Veteran Joined: 24 Feb 2003 Posts: 1217

Well, good luck to you.

Are you running it through kdm,xdm or gdm? If you are, you might consider temporarily altering your rc.conf to let it fire up with a startx, then log the output. If that is not verbose enough, do the same thing execpt strace your startx and dump it to a log. See if there is anything kde is trying to open or write to that it cannot.

(you will need to emerge strace for that if you haven't already)

G
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gwion · Posted: Thu Jul 22, 2004 4:34 pm Post subject:

The file permissions are ok, but when I start kde via startx i get "could not initiate kdeinit. check your install"

Looks like fresh emerge...
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But the best thing about being an older goth? The fact that no one tries to tell you "It's a phase!" anymore.
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gwion · Posted: Fri Jul 23, 2004 6:22 am Post subject:

No, a new emerge did not help.

If anyone has any idea please help I really don't know how to fix this.... on all other computers it worked out of the box...

funny enough: I thought I'd give gnome a shot on this box: gnome stops at the bootsplash... still fluxbox and xfce4 work... *sigh*

Hoping for ideas...

Many thanks in advance!

Gwion
_________________
But the best thing about being an older goth? The fact that no one tries to tell you "It's a phase!" anymore.
--
gwion@jabber.org

grooveman · Veteran Joined: 24 Feb 2003 Posts: 1217

Did you try an strace? That is an extremely helpful tool. Dumpt the output to a log, then search the text for "fail". It should point you in the right direction.

G
_________________
To look without without looking within is like looking without without looking at all.

gwion · Posted: Fri Jul 23, 2004 12:41 pm Post subject:

gwion · Posted: Fri Jul 23, 2004 7:55 pm Post subject:

gwion · Posted: Sat Jul 24, 2004 12:58 am Post subject:

EDIT: OK now I am really depressed... I solved it but the problem was... IPTABLES... (I accidentally blocked traffic from localhost to localhost...). However I don't understand why this affected gnome and kde but not fluxbox.... I really apologize for all trouble and thanks again for your help!!!

Ok, I just let the computer wait now for 5 minutes and kde loaded finally. However it is painfully slow. Opening the menu takes minutes...

I HAVE my hostname in my /etc/hosts file, I also have DMA enabled... the only difference to my other boxes is that the others have Nvidia graphics cards... this one here has an onboard Prosavage chip.

I am afraid I am getting annoying but do you have any more ideas? :cry:

Thanks!

Gwion
_________________
But the best thing about being an older goth? The fact that no one tries to tell you "It's a phase!" anymore.
--
gwion@jabber.org