First off I would like to say hello to the Slackware community. It's been less than a day since I finished installing Slackware; Although not everything worked the way I wanted to right out of the box, I went through the process of fixing and changing stuff which, to my surprise, was very educational! (Yes I've migrated from Windows).

The only problem that's kept me busy for hours is what the topic says. When I try to startx as a non-root user the KDE splash screen hangs on "Starting system services" indefinitely. My guess is it should be permission related since KDE starts fine with the root account, although I have not been able to prove it because after switching back to the terminal with CTRL + ALT + F1 when KDE hangs, I don't see any informative errors. Here's what the terminal says:

At first I thought it's because of that fonts error/warning, but after comparing this log with the log generated from running KDE as root, I noticed that it's there too so that goes out of the window as well(?)

I think I need your knowledge to fix this one. Feel free to ask if you need more info. Thanks for your time.

P.S. I am able to run other window managers with non-root users.

this might help.

first of all change your default runlevel to 4..by editing /etc/fstab
reboot

Maybe you need to add yourself to the video or audio group. Just guessing. The plugdev, cdrom and power groups can be useful too.

I think you mean /etc/inittab ? changing the runlevel didn't help, thanks for the suggestion.

I'm giving your suggestion a go rg3, I'll keep you updated. Thanks for your interest. EDIT: That didn't help either =(

summary of my thoughts about your problem:

hmm... regular users can use other wm but not kde... font type error reported when trying to start up...

maybe kde uses fonts the other wm don't and those fonts are not installed on your system, or the path to them might be incorrect in the FontPath option of xorg.conf...

... i would try examining the FontPaths in xorg.conf and then verify that they are pointing to directories that exist on your system... also check permissions and ownerships (on my 12.2 system, /usr/share/fonts and all subdirectories are owned by root:root with permissions mode of 0755...

... when installing did you install all of the kde set? did you check, at the mirror where you downloaded the sets to see if there were any kde-related packages in the patches directory (I switched from 12.0 to 12.2 and skipped 12.1, so don't recall anything about 12.1 patches)...

... since it is a fresh install, is there any reason to use 12.1 over 12.2 or 13?

I just double-checked the paths, They all refer to existing sources. I wouldn't be able to run KDE as root if xorg.conf had incorrect settings right?


Same here.

Yes I think I have, since I installed full Slackware from the 12.2 DVD downloaded from one of the mirrors on slackware.com . I've noticed the line where it says 12.1 but I have no Idea why because I'm running 12.2 I would get Slackware 13 but ATM I don't have access to a high-speed internet connection.

Well if root has a working xorg.conf in his current directory (likely /root/) then X will use that instead of the default /etc/X11/xorg.conf.

If you find an xorg.conf file there maybe (back up the original) and copy that to /etc/X11/xorg.conf.

Did you check the /var/log/Xorg.0.log ?

Please post the list of groups to which your user belongs to:

Delete /var/tmp/kdecache-<user that cant run kde> and /tmp/kde-<user that cant run kde>

You may also want to run as root chown -R <user that cant run kde>:users /home/<user that cant run kde> . If all that fails delete /home/<user that cant run kde>/.kde

Hmm... I've might have missed it, but looking this thread over, I don't see any mentioning of you ever having run, as root, xorgsetup (which does it for you) or xorgconfig ( in which you have to know which video card driver to choose and your monitor's horizontal sync and vertical refresh frequencies)... either of these apps will make an /etc/X11/xorg.conf for you, though it is a good idea to back up original.

Your user does need to belong to various groups to run various services within the wm ( i.e., using the file pointed out by gegechris99, I add myself to floppy to use floppy disks, to audio to hear sound in wm, to plugdev to mount disks, to cdrom, to scanner, etc.). however, before I was aware of this, the wm did start up, except I didn't have sound and couldn't use cd's, etc... so I came to this forum and read the sticky on hal, and then that was solved, but it (and I was using xfce4 for wm) did start up before I added the user to any of those groups...

hopefully it just takes xorgsetup !

Thanks all for trying to help. I'll try to put the outcome of all your suggestions in one post.

I Didn't find a xorg.conf file in my root folder. I checked the logs generated from startx both as root and non-root and it says "Using config file: "/etc/X11/xorg.conf" so they should be using the same file.

I have attached a log generated by a non-root user.



audio, video, cdrom, plugdev and power . I added the user to these groups as suggested by rg3 earlier.


I deleted /var/tmpkdecache-<user> but /tmp/cache/kde-<user> didn't exist, ran chown -R <user>:users /home/<user>. It didn't help. I also deleted /home/<user>/.kde afterwards and tried startx as <user> to no avail. The latter just resulted in the kde first-time-configuration-wizard to be shown when I tried to startx as <user>, but after completing the wizard KDE hanged on "starting system services" again.

Yes I had run xorgconfig to setup x right after installing slackware. I was having the same problem with the xorg.conf generated by xorgconfig. I have also tried xorgsetup. My current xorg.conf is generated by the latest Nvidia driver which seems to work great in my root account; But the problem with non-root users persists.

I have attached my xorg.conf

xorg.conf.txt

Xorg.txt

Hello,

You seem to have installed the proprietary nvidia drivers. Is that correct? If yes then you should have told us.

You need to search the forum for specific issues related to this proprietary driver.

As a first step, you can try with the open source nvidia driver. In xorg.conf, change in the Device section:

into

I'm reading some pages about problems related to this driver, but as I mentioned I was having this problem before installing the nvidia driver.

I suggest that you switch to 'nv' driver so that if you still have issue as non-root user, we are not polluted with potential issues related to proprietary driver.

Please post /var/log/Xorg.0.log after you switched to 'nv' driver.

I switched over to the nv driver. The problem persists and I see a lot of tearing on my screen now(logged in as root).

Here's the new log:
Xorg.0.log.txt

One of the main reasons that attracted me to Linux was the security it offered, but always being logged in as root isn't really what I call secure. So hopefully with the help of you Linux gurus I would be able to fix this problem without switching to another distro.