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The following selection of problems and solutions is based on actual problems reported by users of the KDE-1.0 and KDE-1.1pre* RPM packages.
Perhaps rpm
issued error messages that kdesupport could not be installed
because libjpeg
, libgdbm
, etc were missing.
This is because you have the previous KDE-1.0 "rh51" rpms
installed, and kdesupport no longer provides support libraries
that Red Hat also supplies. You must first uninstall the
KDE-1.0 rpms with rpm -e ...
. Red Hat 5.1 users will
need the Red Hat libjpeg-6b
and libungif
rpm packages from the "jpeg" subdirectory of the Red Hat 5.1 updates
section on Red Hat's ftp site.
Some 1.1pre* KDE RPMS react badly with these when being
updated. The necessary files /etc/profile.d/kde.sh
,
/etc/profile.d/kde.csh
, or
/etc/pam.d/kde
may have got deleted when the older
KDE RPMS were upgraded.
It is possible to repair
this by copying the kde.sh
and kde.csh
files
from /opt/kde/etc/profile.d
(or its equivalent if
you installed the RPMS to a different location than /opt/kde
)
to /etc/profile.d
and making them executable by all
( chmod +a /etc/profile.d/kde.*
). Also
cp -p /etc/pam.d/xdm /etc/pam.d/kde
will restore the PAM
configuration.
A symbolic link from /opt/kde/redhat-docs
to
/usr/doc/KDE-1.1
may also be missing.
Hovever, the easiest (and best) fix is just to force reinstallation of the KDE base system:
rpm -Uvh --force kdesupport-1.1-*rh*.i386.rpm
rpm -Uvh --force kdelibs-1.1-*rh*.i386.rpm
rpm -Uvh --force kdebase-1.1-*rh*.i386.rpm
Now login again, and rerun the kdm_on
script
if you are trying to make kdm
work.
A different reason for this problem, particularly if it just affects
a particular user, may be that the user's KDE configuration
files are out of date. To check for this. the user should
move their ~/.kderc
, ~/.kde
and ~/Desktop
out of the way, rerun usekde
, and try to start KDE
again.
This is not the way to start KDE. "startkde" is invoked by .Xclients as part of the X startup process. KDE should start when an X Window section is opened, if you have previously run the "usekde" script to set up your KDE desktop..
Delete or rename the .Xclients
file in your home directory,
and try "startx
" again.
If it does not work, this is not a KDE problem.
(Did you really have a working X Window system that could be
started by "startx
" before installing
KDE?)
If .Xclients.kdesave
exists in your home directory,
does moving this back to .Xclients
make the X Window system work (without starting KDE)?
If so, examine it to find out why.
If .xinitrc.kdesave
exists, try moving it back
to .xinitrc
and test this too, to see if any
required customizations were placed there.
Are the scripts in the directory /etc/X11/xinit/
customized in some special way needed by
your system? (Test for modifications to the Red Hat
default scripts with "rpm -V xinitrc
".)
If so, reinstall .Xclients with "usekde"
, and add these customizations to it. If this solves
the problem, you should customize the default .Xclients
that usekde
installs, as described in
"
Customizing the default Desktop".
If startx
works when the .Xclients
file is removed, shut down the X Window system, and reinstall
.Xclients
with "usekde". Check that .Xclients
contains the single executable line
"/opt/kde/bin/startx
", and that "ls -l .Xclients
"
reports it as executable
(the permissions should be "-rwxr-xr-x").
If .Xclients
seems correct, but your
problem persists, your problem may be the next one.
Check that the "/
" or "/home
" partition of your
hard disk is not full. KDE needs to write to some files to begin a
session. ("df
" will tell you the status of your various disk
partitions).
Are there lots of error messages that various files are not
being found? You may have installed an incompatible QT library
(compiled with the wrong compiler, or old version, etc.).
Check the QT installation with "rpm -q qt
" and
"rpm -V qt
".
Verify (rpm -V) kdesupport
, kdelibs
, and
kdebase
. Did you install them in the correct order?.
Check that /etc/ld.so.conf
contains a line
"/opt/kde/lib
"; if not, add it and run "/sbin/ldconfig
".
Check the KDEDIR environment variable with "echo $KDEDIR
" (it should
be "/opt/kde
"); is /opt/kde/bin
in your path
(type "echo $PATH
")?
If not, examine your /etc/profile
for any strange customizations,
and remove them. Does /etc/bashrc
or .bashrc
contain anything strange (KDE related) that you put there to configure an
older KDE installation (they should not refer to KDE)?
If no problems are apparent, completely remove the kde installation
with "rpm -e kdexxxx
" (xxxx = base, libs, etc. in the reverse order
from installation), remove /opt/kde
, and reinstall the RPM
packages in the
correct order. If this clean reinstallation
does not work, post a description of your
problem to the "kde-user" mailing list (see
http://www.kde.org).
Check that you have a .Xclients
hidden file in your home directory.
Look at it with "cat ~/.Xclients
".
Does it invoke /opt/kde/bin/startkde
?
If not, (re)install the correct one by running "usekde
".
If .Xclients
seems OK, there is probably a
.xsession
file in your home
directory that is running another window manager. Rename
.xsession
to
some other name, so it will not preempt .Xclients
.
If this is not the problem, look at /etc/X11/xdm/Xsession
to see if it has been customized
in some non-standard way ("rpm -V XFree86
"
will report if it has been changed from the default).
Check the .Xclients
in your home directory, as described earlier.
Is there a .xinitrc that preempts it?
(rename it). Is /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc
customized in some strange way?
("rpm -V xinitrc
" will show if it has been changed).
This could be because the .Xclients
in your
home directory is corrupt or not executable.
Check it as described earlier.
This could be because a file system is full. Check this
with df
.
This could be also a problem with /etc/pam.d/kde
.
Check if you can login using xdm
instead.
If xdm
works, you have a kdm
problem.
If /etc/pam.d/xdm
and /etc/pam.d/kde
are different,
PAM has been customized; copy your
/etc/pam.d/xdm
to /etc/pam.d/kde
,
with cp -dp
to preserve the
permissions.
If xdm
is not working, it is not a kdm
problem,
so get this fixed first. Note, to test xdm
and
kdm
, it is best to switch to runlevel 3, with
"telinit 3
", and (as root) run xdm
or kdm
from the terminal.
You must be the superuser to do this.
If you are in runlevel 5, shut the X Display Manager down
with "telinit 3
".
If the X Display Manager was started from the command line on a
terminal screen, it can only be stopped by killing the process with
"kill -INT <pid>
" where <pid> is the Process ID
number of the xdm
or
kdm
which is running.
This is written in /var/run/xdm.pid
(for both xdm
and kdm
),
so "cat /var/run/xdm.pid
" will tell you what it is.
You are loggged in as root
, and have just
installed the RPM packages. You are attempting to run
the usekde
or kdm_on
scripts before
$PATH has been updated to include the directory with KDE
executables. (You did not log in again after installing the
kdebase
RPM package.)
Either log in again now (recommended), or run the scripts with their full path: for example,
/opt/kde/bin/kdm_on
Some of the 2.5.x releases of rpm have a broken /usr/lib/rpmrc configuration file where the entry "gzipbin: /bin/gzip" is incorrectly given as "gzipbin: /usr/bin/gzip" (THIS IS WRONG, gzip is found in /bin/gzip). This will cause the rebuild process to fail when gzip is not found. A simple fix is to create a symbolic link: "ln -s ../../bin/gzip /usr/bin/gzip".
On Red Hat 4.2, RPM packages built with rpm-2.5.x
are incompatible
with earlier versions of rpm
that shipped with the original
distribution. Because of this, the KDE "rh42" RPM packages are
built with the older version of rpm
.
If you try to rebuild the KDE binary RPM packages from the source RPM packages, you may get an error message that the "host type" of your system could not be found.
This probably means that your compilers are not properly installed. If reinstalling the compilers (both gcc and egcs on Red Hat 5.x) does not fix this, here is another fix:
Create a file /opt/kde/share/config.site containing the line "host=i386-pc-linux" (or i586-pc-linux for a pentium, i686-pc-linux for a pentium-II). More information is in files README, INSTALL, and config.sub that are unpacked into /usr/src/redhat/BUILD/kde* during the rebuild process.
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