Okay - you may know I suck at dial-up. But I manage to get it working. Sort of. I've tried to narrow down what the new problem is but it's very inconsistent. After my first successful connection with this modem I shut down the connection and tried to reopen it. My modem went screaming, the caps and scroll lock keys went blinking, my mouse froze, and all the varieties of three fingered salutes did nothing so I had to hit the power switch. Thank god for reiserfs. On reboot I went poking around, created a second connection, checked my /etc/ppp files, etc. Nothing amiss there. Since I think there may be a conflict between my sound card and modem and the first time it went haywire I was playing xmms, I made sure that was never on at connect or disconnect. Yet that apparently isn't the issue, because it happens regardless. (I thought the kernel didn't allow stuff to utterly trash it like that - this is like a rogue program on DOS.) So I noticed once, when I tried kppp I got an error about dcop - sorry, I can't remember the exact wording; I was a bit incoherent when I got it - something about 'unable to connect to dcop server'? I found these files and moved them into another directory to see what would happen and it connected.

lrwxrwxrwx 1 digiot users 36 Jul 12 20:34 DCOPserver_slackath_:0 -> /home/digiot/.DCOPserver_slackath__0
-rw-r--r-- 1 digiot users 55 Jul 12 20:34 .DCOPserver_slackath__0

Are these like stale lock files or are they redundant temp files? Another weird thing is that sometimes I'll open my home directory and emelFM will show them and then I'll switch directories, come back, and they won't be listed. But then I can do an 'ls -al' and they show up there. I did searches from Google Linux on 'dcop kppp error' and such like but didn't turn up anything helpful - and why does Google return more hits to this site than this site's own search engine does? But anyway - now it seems quite random. Sometimes I get a 'NO CARRIER' and sometimes Linux locks up completely and sometimes it connects. And it seems to connect sometimes if those files are gone and never if they're present.

A final bit of the bizarre - at one point in this my keyboard - even after a reboot and when I was doing nothing net related, stopped repeating. Every thing worked except holding down a key produced no response. Hitting it repeatedly moved the cursor appropriately but holding the key did nothing. But now it's spontaneously started working again.

Needless to say I'm lost. Anybody know what's going on or at least what dcop is and where I can find more about it? None of my HOW-TOs seemed to say anything; kppp's help file - isn't, and there's no man page for dcop. Oh, and I tried ppp-go and that never does anything for some reason. At least it doesn't lock the machine, but it doesn't connect either, whereas kppp does sometimes.

DCOP is the KDE gui internal server layer. Update your kde packages to resolve it. DCOP hoses most kde apps if not working properly. Configure your modem with a gnome or gtk based gui in the interim.

Thanks for the reply. So this is a KDE-specific thing and not that Slack-in-general or my machine's screwed? Cool. I don't know about upgrading KDE - maybe I'll just try the Gnome thing. Is there a 'kppp'-like app that doesn't assume you have KDE or Gnome? Like I say, I'd use CLI tools if could get that to work and prefer tools that aren't too linked to one IDE or the other either way.

Still, I wonder what could be wrong with the KDE installation. I haven't heard anybody else having this problem and it's just a normal Slack 9.0 install so I feel like I must have screwed something somewhere along the line. I'd like to fix it so I'd know it wouldn't break again.

"KDE gui internal server layer." Well, back to the search engines I go. You'd think something like that would have some documentation somewhere. *g*

I had problems with DCOP and kppp internet access causing my box to crawl when dealing with file accessing. Make sure you have the lo loopback interface thing for 127.0.0.1 running. I'd turned off the Mandrake Network deamon by mistake.

Ah. Okay. I did have that but I'll check - I suspect it is something like that - something I turned off or added, a file I edited - something. I have to go grab a stick of RAM before the place closes though, so I'll check when I get back. Thanks!

Crap. No more RAM for me til next week.

I think I might be on to something:

http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=25571

says: "dcopserver_shutdown, run at the end of
startkde, takes care of removing the old files"

and

http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=32425

says: "And yes, removing the 3 lines, that
modify /tmp/.ICE-unix from /usr/bin/startkde solved the problem."

Now, these don't sound like my problems, exactly, but I suspect it is because I've screwed up my X initialization by starting it unconventionally. I'm bypassing a lot of scripts, I think, - such as startkde, heh - so a lot of things aren't being started and stopped and cleaned up correctly.

I post this just so somebody can confirm this or tell me my heads up my passwd or so somebody else can learn from it if I am on the right track: fully understand your config files before you modify them. *g*

Installed Redhat 8.0 from scratch.
(1) under root cannot switchdesk Gnome->KDE
(2) under my principal user, I can however switchdesk
Gnome->KDE

but then dialup under KPPP locks the lower icons and lower left arrow menu pop-up.

Well, it's a bump I guess, so I can't complain but it's forum rules not to double post.

July 2001? Geez, you gotta know that.

You're several up on me. I can completely destroy "uncrashable" Linux two or three times a day. If I only had half my display locked up maybe I could still kill KPPP instead of having to pull the plug on the whole machine. *g*

Update on my problem - it's not the startup and shutdown scripts because even when I use KDE and start and shut it down properly, KPPP will still kill Linux. The only thing that seems to help is to reboot - I don't think removing the modules and reinstalling them is sufficient. And a weird thing I notice is that, even when I don't crash, I'll get a NO CARRIER and the only thing that seems to fix that is doing KPPP>Setup>Modem>Query. A box pops up and I close it. Then it connects. Go figure.

Oh, and I forgot to say, loopback is running, Proud. So it's not that, unfortunately. I wish I could figure it out.

May not be so much of an issue, as I've got DSL working under Windows (first time I've touched Windows since I got Slack 9 installed) - now I know the hardware works, so I won't have to worry about that possibility when things are going wrong in Linux. *g* I still need backup dialup access, though, and I just want to understand this, besides.

Oh, and Thoreau - you suggested I use Gnome/GTK. This is really embarrassing but... I can't find it. What was the command again?