Re: [Sheflug] Now a new silly problem!

["Alex Hudson" <nospam [at] york.ac.uk>]

> Thanks Alex but I'm afraid you've lost me...

Sorry!!

> I find I can get into the computer as 'root' by changing to Gnome as the
> window manager and so I altered the init level to 3 in /etc/inittab. This
> took me to a prompt on reboot, but, as soon as I do 'startx', it goes
right
> on into the window manager.

. that's the way it should work, isn't it?!

> I tried 'startx>&1 debug.out' but it didn't
> produce a debug file.

Either you misread or I mistyped ;) What I meant was 'startx 2>&1 >
debug.out'. Again, I'm not sure the 2>&1 has the ampersand in the right
place. Basically, the > debug.out redirects the standard output (stdout, or
the screen usually ;) to the file 'debug.out'. Now, you can do 'startx >
debug.out', but you won't get the error messages in the file, they'll still
appear on the screen. The reason for this is because error messages don't
usually appear on stdout, they appear on stderr. By default, every program
has three files open when it starts: 0 (stdin), 1 (stdout), and 2 (stderr).
By redirecting 2 to 1, we direct the error messages to the standard output
and thus into the debug.out file. I hope this makes sense ;)

> Would a reload of KDE
> sort things out or is it likely to just take its new settings from the
> existing ones and perpetuate the same problem?

You could try deleting your settings directory (.kde, probably). Do a
'ls -la' in your /root directory and delete anything to do with kde. Then
try starting kde again - it should install a clean set of configuration
files, and should work. If that doesn't work, I don't think re-installing
KDE will do anything - it's probably a different problem.

Cheers,

Alex.



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