I am running KDE on Fedora Core 4, and whenever I restart the X server (such as when I shut down) when I turn it back on the number of desktops that I have set has returned to the default 4 (I had it set at 8) and the sound mixer will return to the state where it is a button (when I click on it it asks me which sound device I am using, then puts that on the desktop, with all the things that I don't use so I have to change that around). However it isn't just trashing all of my variables, I put a terminal button on my task bar, and that has stayed there fine. Also things like single clicking on icons stays fine. I would like it to keep all my variables the same way so that I don't have to change them all back every time I log in. Any ideas would be great.

Cheers,
Michael

Hello First Wave fan.

First, are you using the KDE control center software to create these changes? The name of the binary is kcontrol. If you are not using this to set changes in KDE then give it a try. Make sure that you press the "Apply" button after making a change.

All of the things that you mention are controlled in two places. First there is a system wide configuration for X and for KDE. These have default settings. You can override these settings if you have your own copy of these files in your home directory. Check to see if you have the following files and directories in your home directory.

The .xinitrc is a normal text file. The rest are directories.
$HOME/.xinitrc
$HOME/.kde
$HOME/.qt

There may be more configuration files for KDE in the $HOME directory. I use several window managers so my $HOME directory has directories from those other environments.

If you do have at least the .xinitrc file in your $HOME then make sure that your account has read/write access to the file.

If you don't have the .xinitrc file in your $HOME directory then you can copy the system's default file from /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc. Notice that when this file exists in your $HOME directory the name starts with a period but the copy in /etc/X11/xinit does not have a period at the beginning of its name. Once you copy the file to your $HOME directory you have to be able to read and write to the file. That should be okay since your account created the copy but check anyway.

The settings that you listed are not controlled in the .xinitrc file but it is a starting place to configuring the behavior of any window manager. The settings that you listed are stored in the $HOME/.kde directory tree, and maybe in the $HOME/.qt directory tree.

awesome, you are the first person in all the years and places that I've used "paranoid times" as a name to figure out the reference!

I tried using the control panel, and that seemed to work in keeping the desktops the way I set them, though I couldn't find a place to set a sound mixer in it. I'll take another look to see if I just missed it when I get home tonight, otherwise I'll try out your other suggestions.

Thank you very much,
Michael

I've been a big fan of First Wave for a long time.

If you figure out how to get the sound mixer to start automatically in KDE please post that information. That is what I was working on when I decided to start using Gnome about a month ago.

I think I've figured it out. In looking through the control panel I couldn't find anything about the sound mixer on the task bar. However I did go by logout information. Which brought up an idea, so I clicked on the sound mixer button that manages to stay on my desktop. Then it prompted me for which sound device to use. Then I got rid of all the parts of it that I didn't want (such as the mic volume). Then I went down and pressed the logout button, and logged out. When I logged back in the sound mixer was still as I set it. Normally I would just shut down my computer with an "init 0" while still logged in, so I guess it saves the session information on logout, but if it doesn't get to it doesn't save it (and I tried shutting down my usual way, and when the computer came back up everything was still fine, so it looks like you only have to logout once for it to save it).

Thanks for you help,
Michael