I have been testing various desktops lately and most recently I have been looking at KDE 4.9. I got everything up and going and running smooth but when I go to adjust the desktop types the DE crashes. The screen goes black except for the application I had running.

I am running the nvidia driver which works fine under openbox and xfce.

I have done some web searches but nothing seems petinent.

Any ideas where to start ?

You may have tried to change the screen resolution and arrived into a combination not supported by the card or driver. Or maybe you have changed screen environment.

Go to runlevel 3 login as root and try to restore the original xorg.conf file (if the system used it) or fix default resolution to some basic like 800x1024 or 600x800 from there you can reconfigure to a higher reso using a gui in Xwindows.

Sometimes kdm will fix that automatically by letting run X; so from the runlevel 3 shell type "kdm" or if it is default "startx" is sufficient.

Good luck.

Thanks for the suggestions. I tried lower settings but when I go to change the type of desktop or modify the settings it would crash 3 out of 4 attempts and it only recovered about every 1 in 2 crashes.

I been running this card for awhile now at max resolution (1680 X 1050 : Asus VW224) on two monitors and zero issues in Gnome, Xmonad , XFCE or Openbox. I gues I must have done or not done something on the install. I took the install all approach since I am not familiar with that environment...


Any other thoughts ... Anyone ?

Check ~/.xsession-errors and /var/log/Xorg.0.log and maybe try to use the nouveau module instead of the non-free nvidia drivers. Depending on how new is your distro you should be able to use the nouveau module, I always prefer it and worked most of the times.

Thank You robertjinx for the response and suggestion.

I ended up wiping out ~/.kde4 and uninstalled the reinstalled all the packages for KDE. After doing that my issue was greatly reduced. Now the desktop is just crashing on ocassion. The ~/.xsession-errors file I don't see anything that notating a crash so I am monitoring in real timne for the next instance. The /var/log/Xorg.0.log had one gripe that the acpi daemon was not enabled so I just set that up.

Fingers crossed.

PS : Go Sepulnation !