I've created a second user account so that my partner has her own login facility, but it's showing some curious behaviour.

If I try to select some of the apps/facilities from the "K" menu, it fails to display some of the sub-menu's and then the whole taskbar/kicker (or whatever the bottom line of the screen is called properly) disappears.

I've looked at some of the logs to see if I can work out whats going on - to no avail. I've tried to see if it's only certain sub-menu's that this is happening on (mainly on Graphics, Games, Edutainment and development).

The only way to recover this, is to end the session and re-log in as the second user. This isn't happening with my main user account.

Does anyone know what I need to do too sort this out, or where to look to see if I can work out whats going on ??

regards

John

I soon discovered that new users need to be members of the following groups for things to work right:
adm, dialout, cdrom, floppy, audio, dip, video, plugdev, lpadmin, scanner
If they are going to sudo ..., then I think they need to be in the admin group as well.
Maybe this will help?

Nope, she's already in those as "secondary groups" but thanks for the reply - appreciated.

anyone else got any ideas please ?

regards

John

Maybe try and then Control-Alt-Backspace

Thanks for the pointer aysiu, it worked.

Though I have no idea why . I understand what it's done (well sort of), but moving the .kde config file, and then restarting the X server, well why did it work?

It's one of those things that pisses me off about linux - that you can sort problems, but don't know why. Perhaps I should be happy that it worked, but thats not really the point.

Ah well - I suppose I'll have to put up with it. At least it will keep Clare "off my back" with those "you've been meddling with this bloody computer again haven't you?" type comments

Again, thanks for the pointer. Much appreciated.

regards

John

There is a lot of kde configuration stuff in ~/.kde/*. When kde starts, it looks there for the configuration files. If they are not found they are re-created from sensible defaults. So deleting or renaming ~/.kde/* forces kde to restart from scratch.
Somehow, something was wrong in your original configuration. If you are very patient, you could compare your faulty configuration files with your good ones, and find out what went wrong (if not why).
HTH

Hum? yes that did occur to me, but when I click on "it" to see whats there, I just get the usual warning about it being a binary, so I just leave it alone - I presume that theres some way of finding out what's in binary files, but how, I don't know at the moment. It's just one of those things, theres a lot of them in linux and the longer I play with it, the less I seem to know.

regards

John

Thanks...I had some problems with my KDE too. It worked for me too.

So far as I am aware, nothing in ~/.kde is a binary file - they are all text configuration files, so I expect that this is what was corrupted.
Anyway, you seem to be up & running.