KDE empty blue screen after log in
 

I've searched the forums and can't find an answer, please point me to a thread if there is one.

I also went to www.kde.org, and if there's an answer there, it blew past me.

Running Redhat 9, 2.4.20-6 kernal.

Ignorance being a spur and not a limit to me, I decided to log in and use KDE and not Gnome for my session. I added KDE as a desktop environment and rebooted.

First I logged in, got to Gnome, and tried desktop switching. That got me an error that KInetD was not found, and had I restarted KDE after installation?

I poked around in services and found nothing, so I rebooted, and chose KDE as my session, and logged in.

Pure blue screen. No icons, no toolbars, no nothing. Mouse works, but nothing to click on. The only way I knew to turn off the computer was to hold the power button in for a few seconds.

What's wrong?

When booting to graphical mode, or run mode 5, you still have the terminals running. At any time you press and hold <Ctrl> + <Alt> + <F1>, you will switch to terminal 1. Same for <C> + <A> + <F2>, will switch to teriminal 2.

<C> + <A> + <F3> = terminal 3
<C> + <A> + <F4> = terminal 4

Now depending on distribution setup, F5 will be another terminal or the graphics mode. I know on Red Hat's FC4 standard setup, there are 6 terminals and F7 is the graphics.

Now that you know that, you can shut down by switching to a terminal and typing reboot or shut down. Better yet, you can troubleshoot what is going on. The "top" command will tell which processes are running, using the most processing and memory. I would check to see if KDE is running constantly or always a sleep. You can also check on other processes. To exit top, press and hold <Crtl> + C.

In the terminal you can shut down the graphics, by using the following command, "init 3"
That will change your run mode from 5 (graphics) to 3 (text), shutting down KDE. You can restart the graphics too, by using "init 5" or changing to run mode 5. BTW, "init 6" = reboot and "init 0" = shutdown.

I had this same problem. The problem was caused be and line in the .bashrc file where I exported my display. I commented out this line and it worked fine.