Well, I guess I really did it this time. Fairly new to linux (about a year) using Slack 10.0 (2.6.7 kernel) with KDE 3.3 upgrade. Believe it or not this all occurred while trying to install a new printer! Before I go back to the windows method of a 3-4 day reformat/reinstall I'm hoping someone here can help.

It all started when I received a kdeinit failed to start error just after entering user/pass in the kdm login window. The screen was gray instead of the blue BMP that is normally there. After that I got the interprocess communications error indicating KDE was struggling with ~/.DCOPyadayda. I googled on this and tried deleting the /tmp entries and some files in ~/.kde. Still no go.

I ended up removing KDE 3.3 and reinstalling KDED 3.2 from my Slack CDs. I will put KDE 3.3 back on tomorrow when I download b/c my quanta may be out of sync now. I removed it prior to realizing I no longer had the 3.3 packages on CD.

I was trying to find where to start to troubleshoot so I decided to run startkde from a console logged in as root. Here are the issues and errors (I could not directly cut and paste so these are paraphrased a bit):

1) First my host name was gone...uname -a yields (none) for my hostname. My root prompt looks like root@(none). My /etc/host* files are unaltered...WTF? Where did my hostname go?

2) This is the sequence of resulting errors from startkde:
- xset: unable to open display "" <- i get this 3 times
- xsetroot: unable to open display '' <- these are apostrophes vs. quotes above
- ksplash: undefined symbol _ZNK7QPixmap6metricEi
- kdeinit: undefined symbol _ZN12QPaintDevice13setResolutionEi
- startkde: could not start kdeinit. Check your installation.
- Error: Can't open display
- Warning connect failed.
- And a few more...

So I thought perhaps I screwed up X so I removed all 11 X11 packages and then reinstalled them...no change.

If there is any hope of saving this without a reformat/reinstall I think these items would be the place to start. If there are other commands that would help debug please let me know. Sure would appreciate some good ideas...can you since my desperation? haha.

Thanks.

hmm...do you remember which files you deleted in your home directory?
if you create a new user...does the new user have the same errors?

1) 'hostname [yourhostnamehere]'
2) try 'startx' instead of 'startkde' and check the error messages

Thanks Kodon. Here are some more results.


1) I addded hostname myhostname to rc.local and when I boot to console it is still none. But of course, I can change it manually at the console. Where is this normally assigned? My hosts file has 127.0.0.1 myhostname in it.

2) After doing 1 manually, I logged out of root and back in as root and saw myhostname active. Then I created a new user. The files I had deleted from my old user were .DCOP_myhostname_0:0 or close to it...the 0:0 must have something to do with X and the display b/c my new user has this file but it is called .DCOP_myhostname_NODISPLAY. I also deledted .IECAuthority and in ~/.kde the links that point to /tmp. The 0:0 is what makes me think I have an X issue at hand.

Thanks so much for the help...still hoping a "do-over" won't be necessary. Oh yeah, I tried startx as run level 4 and it goes graphical and returns to the GUI logon. I will try from the console too.

-Rich

1) it is saved in /etc/HOSTNAME...you shouldn't have to add the hostname command to rc.local, it should be executing already in rc.M
2) i'm pretty sure new dcop and ice files will be generated at the next login...i vaguely remember a similar problem that i fixed by deleting these. however, i'm not sure if the links will be recreated. anyways, it does sound like an X problem...check /var/log/Xorg.0.log

Ok, I ended up reinstalling my system...Slack10 with a 2.6.7 kernel. I know
bad habit to reformat but I just converted to slack 3 months or so ago and
learned of tripwire so it wasn't a total waste to get a clean run for
tripwire.

Anyway, the same problem still exists as soon as I installed the driver for
the SCX4100 by samsung. I meet all the requirements for the printer (Slack
8.1 or up, >= version of glibc, CUPS and SANE installed). And the driver
comes with an uninstaller but it doesn't remove my kde problem when I attempt
to uninstall. What's really strange is that XFCE is working just fine and the
printer too. CUPS is giving a kernel Opps that I need to investigate but I
can print in XFCE!

Now back to resolving the kde issue. Here is my .xsession-errors after
running xwmconfig and selecting kde and running startx from a run-level
3 boot to console:

-------8<------------------------------------------------
stderr is not a tty - where are you?
access control disabled, clients can connect from any host
kde-config: relocation error: /opt/kde/lib/libkdefx.so.4: undefined symbol: _ZN12QPaintDevice13setResolutionEi
xset: bad font path element (#58), possible causes are:
Directory does not exist or has wrong permissions
Directory missing fonts.dir
Incorrect font server address or syntax
xset: bad font path element (#58), possible causes are:
Directory does not exist or has wrong permissions
Directory missing fonts.dir
Incorrect font server address or syntax
startkde: Starting up...
ksplash: relocation error: /opt/kde/lib/libkdefx.so.4: undefined symbol: _ZNK7QPixmap6metricEi
kdeinit: relocation error: /opt/kde/lib/libkdefx.so.4: undefined symbol: _ZN12QPaintDevice13setResolutionEi
startkde: Could not start kdeinit. Check your installation.
X connection to :0.0 broken (explicit kill or server shutdown).

Warning: connect() failed: : No such file or directory
-------8<------------------------------------------------

Now, here's a quick question. Why isn't .xsession-errors updated for each of
my failed login attempts?

I started troubleshooting by looking into relocation errors and kde's
libkdefx*. It seems that sometimes this is attributed to a mismatch of kde
and qt versions. So I tried downloading qt-3.3.3 and qt-3.3.2 from
linuxpackages.net (LP from here on) and the error above was produced using
qt-3.3.2 from the Slack10 CD. All 3 methods fail. I also thought maybe kde
doesn't know where qt is so I do an export QTDIR=/usr/lib/qt-3.3.2 in my
/etc/profile and I even added /usr/lib/qt-3.3.2/bin to my path.

Now for kde, I didn't install from the Slack10 CDs I downloaded 3.3.2 from LP.
Now prior to this reinstall I ran kde 3.31 from LP and qt 3.3.2 from the
Slack10 CD for a couple of months until the printer driver. Also, I briefly
had kde 3.3.2 and qt 3.3.2 from LP running after this reinstall prior to the
pritner driver install.

This same error occurs for root and a new user. With a new user you actually
get the first time kde startup stuff prior to the error.

I feel like I'm close on this one but could use some pointers. I could do
without kde myself but the family (recent linux converts) probably won't give
up on it yet. So any Slacker and kde gurus out there please chime in and show
me the error of my ways. And just a reminder, the SCX4100 printer is
*supposedly* Linux compatible to the point of listing Slackware 8.1 and up in
the distributions section so I'm not ready to give up on it yet.

Thanks so much.

kodon:

On the hostname issue apparently I was booting run level 1 so the hostname was not being set. Once I booted to runlevel 3 the hostname was there.

Thanks.

hmm...i just had a "bad font path element" issue this week that prevented X from loading.
eventually, fc-cache told me which font directory was the problem...i cleaned it up, and X loaded fine.

regarding version...i tried the unofficial KDE 3.3.2 from kde.org, but went back to KDE 3.3.1 in slackware-current.

the fact that X and KDE will start once for a new user then error out afterwards baffles me...

Let me clarify on the new user scenario. For a new user it doesn't ever work completely. It works up to the point where the startkde script fails on the kde-config (see .xsession-errors in prior post) and the first time user settings are displayed prior to that in startkde but they are displayed just the very first time user logs in. Thus, it always fails for the first and subsequent logins for a new user but on the first you get the one time KDE prompts.

Plan:
I've downloaded the following from slackware.com using the same site as I read somewhere different compilers for kde vs qt may be problematic:

arts-1.3.1-i486-1.tgz
kdeaccessibility-3.3.1-i486-1.tgz
kdeaddons-3.3.1-i486-1.tgz
kdeadmin-3.3.1-i486-1.tgz
kdeartwork-3.3.1-i486-1.tgz
kdebase-3.3.1-i486-1.tgz
kdebindings-3.3.1-i486-1.tgz
kdeedu-3.3.1-i486-1.tgz
kdegames-3.3.1-i486-1.tgz
kdegraphics-3.3.1-i486-2.tgz
kdelibs-3.3.1-i486-1.tgz
kdemultimedia-3.3.1-i486-1.tgz
kdenetwork-3.3.1-i486-1.tgz
kdepim-3.3.1-i486-1.tgz
kdesdk-3.3.1-i486-1.tgz
kdetoys-3.3.1-i486-1.tgz
kdeutils-3.3.1-i486-1.tgz
kdevelop-3.1.1-i486-1.tgz
kdewebdev-3.3.1-i486-1.tgz
qt-3.3.3-i486-3.tgz

Do I need anything else? I know when I did my first slack10 install with default kde version and I upgraded kde to 3.3.1 I used linuxpackages.net files and I removed arts, kde*, qt and quanta. I can't find quanta anylonger....do I need it?

Thanks.

Also, I've read about multiple installs of qt causing problems. How can I chase that down? Is there a file to search for that may appear in different directories indicating a multiple install. What I'm getting at is I don't know what my printer driver installed...what if it installed another version of qt, etc? The printer driver is binary so I can't read what might be occuring.

Thanks

Well me personally. NEVER user linuxpackages.net for anything as critical as kde.(not necessarily *critical*) I use linuxpackages for things like....filelight. Use the Official slackware mirrors *only*. For those kinds of things. Go to slackware.com and then go to get slack. Go to one of the mirrors and on there you can get all the *Official* kde packages. Also, have you heard of swaret or slackpkg? check them out.

no...quanta is not necessary. it's just an html editor.
the packages you listed should be all you need.

just to clarify: did you get them from slackware.com through the package browser or from another site?

From slackware.com package browser...I selected the same mirror from the download page each time. I will reinstall tonight and post back.

Thanks.

http://www.linuxprinting.org/forums....l;article=1076

That should get you to the thread at linuxprinting.org. I was able to get this working by modifying an install script and changing a symbolic link.