Ok, I have a iBook G3 800MHz with just Mandrake on it, it has a ATI Radeon Mobility 7500 video card in it and I've been tweaking the XF86Config-4 file for days now and it kde continues to refuse to work , I've currently got it to start up but the background is red, I can see and manuver the mouse pointer fine but I can't see the dialogues because they're covered up by the red background , I have tried using the settings from Gentoo live cd but no luck there either, I have tried using both the ati and fbdev as display drivers and both return the red background, I've also tried adding Option=UseFBDev and still no luck, how can I get kde to work successfuly? Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Are you logged in as root?

KDE with Mdk always used to do horrible things to its GUI if logged in as root.
If so dont do it it hurts the penguins, log in as a normal user and su or kdesu to root.

Si

Is this a Mac thing?

I've NEVER seen such behavior on PC's.

No Mdk has done this for a while, since maybe 8.2 or 9.0. Its not an altogether bad thig. You should not be logged in as root at the GUI. Log in as you and su in a terminal if you need to be root. Its much safer!

Si

No this is incorrect, I've been using Mandrake quite since 7.0 and the root login never "hurts" ANYTHING.

Mandrake does TRY to discourage you from logging in as root as all the scripts bail out early if you are logged in as root, giving you a rather rudimentary desktop which is not as pretty or complete as a normal user.

But all the functionality is right there.

Normally to make things look like they do for a normal user for root, I log in as a NEW user at least once.

Then I recursively copy that new user's files into the root directory.

e.g. as root


cp -raf /home/dummyuser/* /root

You need to get all of the hidden .KDE directories as well.

Then once done

cd /root

find . -exec chown root {} \;
find . -exec chgrp root {} \;

After doing this everything will appear exactly the same for a root login as it does for any other user.

Sorry, I'm going to get on my high horse over this information.

Logging in as root should _never_ be a user's normal behaviour. Ever. It is very bad practice.

Firstly it negates alot of the *nix system security, given by the fact that normal users have far lower priveleges. Secondly a mistake made as root can easily ice the whole system, whilst a user should only be able to trash their personal data.

This is a major reason for XP being so poor at security, users are allowed to log in as administrator easily, without even having to set up user accounts.

opjose is correct, logging in as root will not hurt the system. But you will hurt the system if you doing something daft by mistake and are logged in as root. Furthermore if you are connected to the internet you are enabling anyone who gets control of your box thru you as your user to have full root permission to do anything anywhere they like. Not clever.

I stand by my original advice, and the recognised good practice. Do Not log In As Root!!! Unless you really have to, ie the system is in trouble, and then go in to runlevel 3 not 5, and deal with it there. Use a normal user the rest of the time and su or ksudo to get root priveleges.


Stay Secure.
Si

You get NO arguement on this from me!

Even as an ahem, "experienced" linux and unix user I've managed to do some pretty stupid things.

E.G.

rm -rf filename\ *\ junk.txt

OOPS!

Bye-bye file system.

Newbies, did you catch the mistake?

The SUDO command is pretty powerful for root access when you need to edit system files, etc.