Firstly i would like to say hi.I am a linux newb. Having given up on the dinosaur that is microsoft.
About a week ago I had Squeeze kde installed on to my eee pc 701;and I love it. However whenever I try to select or view some advanced menu's in system settings or save anything ie word documents,screenshots etc the screen goes black and I end up at the login screen.(The system setting occurence is random;the save one is every time.)Apart from becoming a tad annoying now,it makes it nigh on impossible to take screenshots for posting on forums.
On another forum someone suggested I look into my 'groups'.Whilst doing this in file manager under root heading I noticed several files with small black boxes with a white up pointing arrow. Having played with my eeepc and it's xandros distro & synaptic package manager I am assuming these files/folders require upgrading?
I am still trying to work out the package manager in squeeze and signing in as 'root' in a terminal.I have opened a terminal but am not aware of really what to do or where to go in the terminal.I am not afraid to go under the hood so to speak;but I am only just starting to learn.
Thanks.

If KDE is crashing on certain operations and exiting back to the display manager then it may be helpful to get some basic error information.

First exist to your display manager and do CTRL+ALT+F1

Login as your normal user and then do

(enter the root password)

Then

Or if it's gdm you're using
Then

To lose root privileges (very important)

Finally

Now do what you did before and when you get dumped back at the command line note and write down any error information you see.

1 members found this post helpful.

Wow!That was quick.Thankyou for the info.I will try that when I get home tonight.Thankyou also for 'spelling' it out for me in such detail.It is a bit daunting as a newbie,worrying about crashing your computor majorly by not knowing what you are doing.This is one of the very reasons I have made the switch to linux;the friendly helpful,and welcoming people in the community.

I am not a KDE user so will not get involved here further than to suggest you check your sources.list. This should not really help your current problem but may prevent future ones.

There is a sticky thread here just for Debian sources.list;
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...13/page17.html

That is the address for the last page. Start there and work back if you need to. The early pages are from a long time ago and do not have much to do with you today.

Well I tried your suggestion Caravel.I tried to save something in open office,this was the result:as usual the screen went black,but this time I had a single 'dash' in the top left hand corner and 2 blue coloured dots in a figure of eight formation;(ie what my mouse pointer looks like whilst waiting for an action-except it normally rotates)The screen was frozen/stuck like this.I left it for about 5 mins before doing a hard switch off.
I then switched it back on again.Everything started as normal,and I logged in as normal and the fault was still evident. Ho hum.
I didn't get around to trying anything else;like file/system updates.Still trying to find time to work out how to update.

Can you do the same again, but this time when it freezes first try CTRL+ALT+F1 and see if there is any error information there. Because X was started from tty1 any error messages relating to this should be there. If there are none, try CTRL+C and you may see something come up.

If it doesn't respond hit CTRL+ALT+DEL, if it doesn't respond at all, then you will need magic SysRq keys (don't just force a hard reset or power off):

Hold Alt+SysRq and then hit, in sequence (one after the other about 10 seconds apart) R E I S U B.

Anyway, if I had to guess, I'd say you have a bad install there. What iso image did you download, where from, etc?

Thanks again for an informative quick response.I will give it a go later when I get home.Hopefully. It is funny you mention a bad install.I was starting to think along those lines myself.I don't have the download details to hand,but will supply them later.
I refer back to my original 'post', re several files having small black boxes with white arrows in them.Update required ? I mention this again because that is how I got rid of the wireless 'Pending' issue in my Xandros install.

Cheers

Evening all.Here goes.Caravel;I did as you suggested as follows: file manager (dolphin);opened terminal via file manager.Terminal had martin:bash at the top of it (outside of terminal window).In window -martin@yak:~$ I did ctrl+alt+F1 and got this result.... Debian GNU/linux 6.0 yak tty1
yak login:martin
PASSWORD:
Last login:Wed Oct26 21:08:17 BST 2011 on tty1
Linux yak 2.6.32-5-686 #1 SMP mon Jun 13 04:13:06 UTC 2011 i686
martin@yak:~$

I then carried on with the rest of your instructions.When I entered startx I got....

Fatal server error:
Server is already active for display 0
If this server is no longer running ,remove /tmp/ .x0-lock
and start again

Please consult the The X.Org Foundation support
at http://wiki.x.org for help
The only problem I had was trying to exit the terminal.I tried 'exit'(used to be the command on my Xandros system) ended up using ctrl+alt+delete (probably wrong thing to do).Ended back at login screen,logged in ok. Tried to save open office doc with same result of ending up at login screen.However had no lock up issues tonight.Probably screwed it up trying to get out of the terminal last night.
Decided to look at the usb used to install squeeze onto my eeepc. I had used 'linux live' to create the usb.I had used virtualbox to run the os on my windows xp machine. I wasn't able to get the usb to work on my eeepc running xandros.
Anyway looking at contents of usb and running live linux the 'face page' had the following: Persistant;live;live (failsafe);live 686;live 686(failsafe);text instal,text expert,and text rescue.
However,looking at what came up on my eeepc re linux version I think my work mate has installed the wrong version onto my computor. I think he has installed the i686 version instead of the i386 version of squeeze....Your thoughts sir?

Again many thanks.I apologise inadvance if it seems I have put too much info in (ie the contents of the Debian face page from my live usb)I am sure you are well aware of the usual contents. I am trying to be as methodical and informative as possible so as to reach an early resolution to this problem. I do appreciate that you assistance is helpful,volunteered,and at the expense of your time.

You are confusing i386 with amd64. I believe the Intel Atom should be able to run i686 kernel just fine.

Before running startx you stop KDM or GDM with the command ' /etc/init.d/kdm stop ' or gdm3 as needed.

Evening Caravel, in answer to one of your questions I got my image from cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/release/current-live/i386/iso-hybrid. The image was/is 'debian-live-6.0.3-i386-kde-desktop.iso.
I have decided to re-install squeeze and see if that sorts it out.

Well since my last post I have re-installed 'Squeeze' twice.I must admit each time I seem to be able to do more before it decides to return me to the login screen. About all I can't do now is empty the trash bin, or log out of forums;such as this,or save/back up my bookmarks.

It is all very confusing,but getting there.I still have no idea what is going on. Ideas anyone?

This all seems very strange.

I do not see any indication of the size of your drive or what all is on it. That would be nice to know.

How did you install Debian? Is it on one partition or on 2 (or more)?

There really is a point to these questions, hard as it may be to believe.

Hi all. In answer to Widgets questions. My computer is a eee pc 701. It has a 4 gig solid state hard drive.It has 2gb of ram.The debian squeeze I installed was loaded via usb stick because my netbook does not have an optical drive.
The debian os was installed on a single partition. The original Xandros os was on a split drive.It had 2 partitions.All that is installed on the ssd is the operating system.
I hope this is of help.
Many thanks.

So. you have a 4Gb SSD with nothing but debian installed.

Where are you storing anything? 4Gb seems a bit small to me for an OS to have any room to breath with you entire user directory on it.

How much room is open on this SSD?

1 members found this post helpful.

What I would recommend is you install Xfce4. I just installed it on a partition aftarer purging KDE and my total disk usage is 955M as reported by ' du -hx '. This can be done with the Debian installer or you could use http://www.salineos.com/ . SalineOS is 99.9% Debian with a bunch of scripts to help you install multimedia your wireless card and other stuff. Plus they have a fine forums to answer any question you may have.

Another solution would be to purge Gnome and install Xfce4.

1 members found this post helpful.