Just wanted to let you guys know that KDE 3.4 was released via apt4rpm today. If you have a chance, install it. It all works now. And it looks incredible. And I hate KDE! No kidding. Now that's saying something.

Hmm, it may well rock all - I have just upgraded this morning - but what the h*** have they done with Gnome? It's no longer listed as an option at login. I tried changing the default to Gnome in the Desktop, Window Manager section of Control Center /etc/sysconfig Editor. Then tried rebooting and choosing Default from the list of sessions, but it still goes into KDE. At one time (ie in a previous version of KDE) there was a Sessions tab in the Control Center, Login Manager, where you could add Gnome to the sessions list, but this tab is no longer there in KDE 3.4.

And now that my upgrade has installed amarok 1.2-CVS, that no longer works ! It says "GStreamer could not create the element : decodebin".

I do like the KPDF pdf viewer though.

Why wouldn't you install Gnome if you wanted to use Gnome. Why are you trying to use Gnome on KDE instead of Gnome on Gnome? Maybe I'm missing something obvious here..

When I originally installed SuSE 9.2 I installed both the desktops: Gnome and KDE - and then at log-in I could choose whichever I wanted to use. However, since my KDE upgrade yesterday Gnome is no longer listed as an option at the log-in screen. To get it back, I don't know whether I should be looking to change something in KDE or something in SuSE itself. I haven't had time since yesterday to investigate this further but am going to see if I can find anything later today.

Marrea,

I had something similar happen to me when i upgraded suse 9.0 from kde 3.1 to kde 3.2... a real pain.

i seem to remember it being to do with the kdm login manager configuration, but can't remember specifics...

you could try changing the login manager to gdm, see what happens (but i'm really guessing here...)

Well, so far this afternoon I've tried running Gnome from text mode, with the command gnome-session. This merely resulted in

(gnome-session: 5684): GtK-WARNING ** : cannot open display

so I think something has obviously gone screwy somewhere. I've never had to delve into login managers before so this is new territory for me.

Incidentally, I've managed to make amarok work again but only after deleting amarok-gstreamer. I can now use either arts or akode as the engine. Before, I couldn't even change the engine in the amarok configuration. The program just crashed.

Another problem I have discovered since the upgrade is that OpenOffice won't work properly. I go to save a file in Writer, it won't let me - just crashes. And then if I close Writer and try to open it again, it won't open at all until I do a reboot. But as I can't save any files, there's not much point opening it !!

You just need to copy over the proper desktop file to your kdm directory.
Open a terminal and su to root. Then enter these lines:

Xian

Very many thanks. I'm at work at the moment but will try this when I get home.

Is the fact that I couldn't even open Gnome from text mode, which merely resulted in

(gnome-session: 5684): GtK-WARNING ** : cannot open display

connected to this as well?

That's probably due to the fact that you had just left an X session. Had you done a level 3 boot and given the command before loading X, then most likely you would not have received that error message.

I think I was in the GUI and gave an init 3 command to change to runlevel 3 in order to try the gnome-session command which resulted in that error message.

Anyway, as I said, I'll see if I can get this sorted tonight when I get home.

Thanks again.

I have a weird issue with kde 3.4. I don't see my trash icon anymore. when I delete files it says "move to trash" but I don't actually see the trash icon on the desktop.

Xian - a thousand thanks. I now have my Gnome back.

How can I learn how to fix problems like this? Whereas I have quite a few books on Linux generally, I find detailed documentation on the KDE and Gnome desktops and how they work, their configuration files, etc. hard to come by. Do you have any suggestions as to where I could gen up on this sort of thing?

Right-click on an empty place on your desktop.
Select "Create New" > "Link to Location (URL)"

When that window opens fill in the following information:

File Name: Trash
Enter Link To Location (URL): trash:/

Click okay. That should set you back up.
The normal icon should appear in your next session.

Check that. You'll actually have to apply it yourself via the properties window.

You generally learn by breaking things and then finding solutions.

I learned about desktop files when I was trying to get Xfce running on an old system and it wouldn't display that session as an option within the KDM login screen. Some nice folks on this forum showed me how to create and place them in the proper directories. In this case, if you have two gnome.desktop files on your system (which is normal in SuSE), and only one of them works, then it's just a matter of comparing what is different, or simply using the file that creates the proper result.

For detailed information on Gnome go to Gnome Hacks and the Gnome Forums.