Gnome/ KDE Conflicts
 

I'm having some conflicts between Gnome and KDE that I'm not quite sure how to cure. After installing the rss screensavers I noticed that they would'nt work in KDE but would in Gnome. I selected one to run in Gnome, and when I'm in KDE it will run instead of the screensaver that I selected for KDE. When I logout from a KDE session it sometime goes to the default Gnome background, or black with just a cursor. CTRL + ALT + backspace will either take me back to the login screen or dump me to a command prompt. Anybody have an idea where to start?

Things to try
 

Hi Lindy,

Disclaimer: I usually turn off fancy screensavers and just use a blank page as the screen saver, since historically I have found that screen savers had problems with older versions of these window managers and X servers (not the least of which is questionable coding practices by some screen savers). I run F7 running the latest GNOME (latest w.r.t. what the standard updates provide, not compiled from latest source).

Things to try that might shed some light on the problem.

1. Is the behavior the same when you hit CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE while running KDE and also from GNOME?
2. How did you install the rss screensavers?
3. Is the behavior the same when you hit CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE from either KDE or GNOME after you have uninstalled the rss screensavers?

bgoodr

Hi bgoodr,

1. The behavior is specific to KDE.
2. The screensavers were installed via yum.
3. I was having logout problems with KDE before the screensavers were installed, and am still having after
uninstalling them.

The only problem I'm having with Gnome is that I have two trash cans, and any desktop icon that I have in KDE appears in Gnome and is labeled no name.

Wow. That is indeed bizarre. I'm using GNOME with the Metacity window manager which is the default AFAIK, and I don't see that behavior.

Is there a reason why you need to switch between two different window managers instead of getting one to work and saying with that one?

I'm not really opposed to KDE, other than the fact that the format of the files in $HOME/.kde directory were not interoperable between different KDE versions, so I had to ditch them (affected me at work where I have to deal with multiple revisions of both KDE and GNOME desktop versions).

One thing you can try is to move aside your $HOME/.kde directory from within a console terminal, and then restart your X server with CTRL-ALT-DELETE.

Alternatively, since you stated you had problems with CTRL-ALT-DELETE, you may want to play it safe and do the move of the $HOME/.kde directory when the X server is not running. The way I do that is as follows:

1. Logout of the window manager
2. At the X login prompt (GDM/XDM/whatever), press CTRL-ALT-F1 to get to a console (X will still be running at this point)
3. At the login prompt in the console, login as root
4. Enter in "init 3" at the shell prompt. This will kill the X server, along with KDE or GNOME processes
5. After you get to another shell prompt, cd into your users $HOME directory (not $HOME of root)
6. Move the .kde directory aside with the mv command
7. Enter in "init 5" to restart X and get back to the X login prompt
8. Log back in as your user account (not as root)
9. Examine your icons to see if they still persist, and retry CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE to see if the behavior improves.

The theory is that perhaps the installation/de-installation of the screen savers left some stale data in the $HOME/.kde directory, and moving it aside while X is not running will cause the behavior to correct itself.

bgoodr

Well poo... No effect

If you are logging into KDE, and not GNOME, and you have moved your .kde directory aside, and you still see duplicate icons, then I'm really puzzled as to where KDE could be reading its settings for that. Sorry I couldn't be of more help.

The duplicated icons are in Gnome, but as it is I think I'll load Fedora8
up on a VM and pound on till it breaks and see if I can shake out any answers.

If this is GNOME, and you are using the Metacity window manager, then I guess that the $HOME/.metacity directory would be where that icon state would be stored. You could play with moving that directory aside to see if the behavior changes.