I've got a really weird problem. I've installed Debian 3.0 (woody) on my pc at home. When I boot, the boot process runs on and presents the graphic login screen. When I login to Enlightenment, no problem - in fact I am posting this from within Enlightenment. However both KDE and Gnome hangs before the GUI is initialised. KDE freezes up just when the splash screen says "initialising peripherals". With Gnome, the splash screen displays something like "starting panels" or "the panel" and then hangs.

What on earth have I done wrong? Any ideas where I can start looking for answers?

Thanks
Joe

Maybe your computer doesn't meet the requirements for KDE or Gnome? You could try downloading and installing an older version of KDE or Gnome and see if it works.

Well, I've used both KDE and Gnome successfully with Suse 7.3 and, as I understand it, the stable Debian distribution is typically not "cutting edge", i.e. the version of KDE on the distribution is not 3, but something from 2.

upgrade to SID, it doesn't hurt to try.

goto your /etc/apt/sources.list and at the top where it gets the files from your designated mirror change from stable to unstable, leave the security.debian.org one alone.

type apt-get update
then apt-get dist-upgrade

you'll now download SID, much more stable than sarge and it has some bug fixes and such from woody.

i suggest that you do not install KDE 2.2,the one that comes with debian. use KDE 3.0.4, add the KDE mirror to your sources.list and update your sources, then download the 12 (i think) necessary debs starting with kdebase.

Thanks very much for the advice. I'll give it a shot and post the result.

Ok, so I was way out of my depth when attempting to apply the above advice and ended up reinstalling Woody as it is on the cd-roms (with the 2.4 kernel).

However, I have discovered something very interesting and also totally mystifying. KDE and Gnome still hangs my whole machine when I try to start it (no problems with Enlightenment). But if I click the go-button to start KDE or Gnome and then press ctl-alt-F1 and wait there for the login to finish (it's a rule of thumb kinda wait ), I can press ctl-alt-F7 and there it is - KDE or Gnome up and running without any problem. In fact I am currently in KDE that was started in exactly this manner.

I'm sure you'll agree that this is a highly unsatisfactory manner to work. Has anybody else experienced a similar problem? If so, please post the solution.

I'd appreciate any and all help to resolve this. What can I post that could shed light on this problem (XF86Config-4, dmesg, etc)?

Thanks
Joe

I do have problems like this - it is not specific to kde though.
It has to do with my xfree setup (which I am too lazy to fix).
I got two different installs of debian one with the newest drivers for my card and one with the regular drivers.
The new drivers require to pass a parameter for memory mapping to lilo.If I start the system with the old drivers with those parameters I have to do exactly the same thing because the old driver doesn't understand the parameter and screws up the memory.
You might have a completly different problem but it might be worth looking into you xfree configuration.
BTW What card do you use?

My card is an Nvida RIVA 128ZX.

When you talk about xfree, is that the same as running dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86? I've run that a couple of times, trying various drivers and the results have been, umm, interesting. IIRC (pc's at home, I'm at work), the current driver is VESA. If I use nv, the screen is totally screwed.

Yeah - same thing.
Unfortunately I don't know the first thing about nvidia cards - they seem to do their own thing with drivers that are made by nvidia.
With my onboard sis I don't get anywhere with dpgk-reconfigure.I always have to use xf86config for some reason.
Anyhow - did you install the nvidia drivers from nvidia or use the ones from debian (nvidia-glx-src xxx and nvidia-kernel-src xxx)?
Other then that it might be a good idea to search the debian mailing list archives for nvidia or to subscribe to their user mailing list and post the question there.The mailing list is really a great resource for help with lots of very knowledgeable guys if you can tolerate about 300 mails per day.
When I installed debian for the first time they got me up and running in a matter of hours.

I used (am still using...) the Debian drivers. Guess I should get off my lazy butt and surf over to Nvidia's site

Thanks for the mailing list advice.