Okay, I made a big mistake installing some Cooker RPMs for SCIM (which is called by just about every x program for me - it's a multilingual input method editor). Immediately upon doing it, stuff started to crash upon loading, and so I logged out and chose failsafe (NOT the failsafe mode that you can get upon boot) to uninstall the bad RPMs and reinstall the old ones.

Anyway, that terminal crashed too, and so I rebooted into the other failsafe, did rpm -e on all the problem RPMs, and then did rpm -i to put the ones from the DVD back. Okay, all well and good so far (I hope).

But then, upon rebooting again (I have mandrake set to boot to my own account automatically with no password, and it uses the last-opened window manager), it crashed again at that terminal. So now I'm wondering what I can do to get it stop starting in failsafe and get it to start in KDE again?

I've tried adding /usr/X11R6/bin to the path and running X, X && startKDE, and startx, but all of those failed due to files that couldn't be found. I also tried putting "exec startkde" in .xinitrc as well.

So now I'm all out of ideas.

What file does Mandrake use to restore the previous window manager? And how can I edit this file?

Thanks.

In response to one of your questions:

I know that Mandrake keeps WM settings in /etc/X11/wmsession.d
In there you will find settings for booting into the various WMs you have installed on your system. 01xx will be the first WM to boot into by default. Unfortunately, that's all I can help you with. I hope you get it sorted out

hello,

if you boot into failsafe mode and try either 'startx' or 'init 5', what error messages do you get? or does the thing just go blank? - in which case, check the XFree86 log file (in /var/log) and post back..

Hey, thanks guys, and sorry for the trouble.

xinit 5 gave me the same problem, but I discovered something strange. The footswitch on my computer wasn't working, so I tried moving it with my hand and pressing the buttons, and it worked!

Okay, not really that stupid, but apparently the failsafe thing hadn't crashed, just that it wasn't working with NumLock on. After turning that off, I was able to go into KDE, only to find that things still weren't completely back to normal.

But after deleting $HOME/.scim and another SCIM-created directory under $HOME/.gconf/apps, I was able to uninstall and reinstall SCIM with no problems, and, as a bonus, I (perhaps crazily) reinstalled the Cooker RPM that had given my trouble in the first place, this time with --nodeps (I figured that some of the dependencies I had also installed had been the root cause of my problems), and lo and behold, that now works perfectly too.

So everything is better than before. Thanks again!

Now on to my next post. This one will be less urgent.