I've installed Mandrake 9.1, and made a custom kernel, installed specific soft as root, but now I want to login in KDE as user, but it does not work ??? I tried different users to log in, but none is working ????

Silly question maybe, but... Did you create the users?

yes, of course ;-)

users can login with ssh, but not in KDE ?

can users login on a text console? If so, does startx work?

do you mean 'failsave' ? : no
loggin in to IceWM seems to work

I'm not sure I can help you but what exactly are the symptoms? You get to the graphical login manager, choose root and then you can login to KDE. You choose any other user, choose KDE and it gets back to the login manager. Are there any messages that you get?
If I understand you correctly, you can choose IceWM and then a user can login and start in icewm.
But if you boot into failsafe mode, no user can login? This would be very strange if you can really start icewm from the login manager.
When you are at the login manager (normal boot), press ctrl+alt+F1 and then try to log in. Can you do it?

alt-ctrl-F1 and login as user works...

alt-ctrl-F1 and login as user works, but this is what is gives at login, and a command like 'ls' is unknown...

-bash: dircolors: command not found
-bash: locale: command not found
-bash: grep: command not found
-bash: uname: command not found
-bash: uname: command not found
-bash: tty: command not found
-bash: id: command not found
-bash: [: -ge: unary operator expected
-bash: tty: command not found
-bash: id: command not found
-bash: id: command not found
-bash: id: command not found
-bash: [: too many arguments
[avierstr@molfyl1 avierstr]$ ls
-bash: ls: command not found

hmm. strange.
when you log in as root, you don't get those messages, right?

when you log in as a normal user, can you try the command
echo $PATH
and see what the output is?
It should give you the list of directories where the system looks for program.

very strange, seems that after alt-ctrl-F1, I can login as user, but not as root ????

echo $PATH gives this :

[avierstr@molfyl1 avierstr]$ echo $PATH
/usr/local/clustalw1.83:/usr/local/paup4b10:/home/avierstr/bin
[avierstr@molfyl1 avierstr]$


I'll think I'll get rid of Mandrake and install Suse...

Ok. There's something wrong with your bashrc and bash_profile files. Before you get rid of mandrake, try the following.
Log in as normal user. Then do
export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin:/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin
After you do this, do
startx
this should start KDE.
If this works, then as a quick fix, I would add the line
export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin:/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin
to your .bashrc in the home directory of each user.

Hi, I'm back from a week holydays...

Now I can login as user in KDE, but still the messages when I login after alt-ctrl-F1 :

avierstr@molfyl1's password:
/usr/X11R6/bin/xauth: creating new authority file /home/avierstr/.Xauthority
-bash: dircolors: command not found
-bash: locale: command not found
-bash: grep: command not found
-bash: uname: command not found
-bash: uname: command not found
-bash: tty: command not found
-bash: id: command not found
-bash: [: -ge: unary operator expected
-bash: tty: command not found
-bash: id: command not found
-bash: id: command not found
-bash: id: command not found
-bash: [: too many arguments
[avierstr@molfyl1 avierstr]$

What security level are you using? 'Paranoid' or a personally tweaked one?

security level 'higher'...

Hmmm... are you using old user accounts on a fresh install? Maybe the users don't have read/execute permissions to the files they need to run to start kde. Such things can become messy...

greetings, kamstrup