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Old 11-20-2005, 07:35 PM   #1
wslyhbb
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KDE crashing as root


I installed Mandriva 2006 PowerPack+ last week. Today when I log in as myself everything seems to be fine, but if I log in as root KDE starts throwing KDE crash errors repeatedly. The backtrace says there is no backtrace, that no debug symbols were found, therefore, I have no idea what is causing the errors. Can anyone help me?
 
Old 11-20-2005, 07:50 PM   #2
Brian1
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I would rename /root/.kde to something like /root/.kde_backup. Login as a regular user. Open a terminal and su to login as root. Use command like this as root.
mv /root/.kde /root/.kde_backup
Then logout and login unde root again.

Just curious what you need to login in to KDE as root to do. Maybe what you are doing can be done as a regular user.

Hope this helps
Brian1
 
Old 11-20-2005, 08:21 PM   #3
wslyhbb
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Ok thanks. I lose all of the settings that way. I was logging in to root to edit system-auth to set up my ldap.
 
Old 11-20-2005, 08:58 PM   #4
Brian1
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Sorry forgot to mention the lose of settings, but if you renamed it then you still the orginal settings. Future note if unsure about editing a file then make a backup. This process has saved many hours of work for me. I forget to mention items like that since they are 2nd nature to me.

Is it not under your user account in Start Menu > System Settings > Authentication. If not create a new menu item and then select the box to run as a differnet user and enter the name root to the box for the user name. If this is the one then you should be able to click on it in your Start Menu and it ask for root' password to start it. If it does not then it might be and issue with PAM and then changing the run as diferent user should do the trick.

Brian1
 
Old 11-21-2005, 08:32 PM   #5
wslyhbb
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Actually, even moving the .kde and letting KDE recreate it still didn't help. I really don't know why KDE is screwed up.
 
Old 11-22-2005, 06:15 PM   #6
Brian1
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Not sure why it errors on root and not any other user account. I am at a lost. I have 2 ides. Both will take some time.
1. Installed a second harddrive and mirror drive to drive. Then remove your good running harddrive and only have the new mirrored one plugged in. From that one start removeing other hidden directories like .local, .kde, .mcop, and anything else that does not look like something you need. Then login into KDE and see if that works. If that works and would like to use the new drive then continue on. If not I would remirror the orginal drive for backup and verfiy it does work. Then you can do what you did to the mirrored drive.

2. This is the worst case fix. Install a new drive and install a fresh copy of your distro. Setup everything from scratch put pull need config files from the orginal drive. If updating the system try to update parts of it at a time and note what you did. Keep testing the system till you get it back to where the orginal drive is. If you have no issue great. If it starts erroring then you have a point from where it did not to when it started.

Brian1
 
Old 11-22-2005, 07:43 PM   #7
wslyhbb
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Ok. Does KDE log anywhere? Also, is there a way to repair a rpm/reinstall it? Meaning, is there anyway I can just reinstall KDE?

Last edited by wslyhbb; 11-22-2005 at 07:50 PM.
 
Old 11-22-2005, 09:12 PM   #8
Brian1
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Best way is to remove rpm's then reinstall them. This can be tricky because of all the dependencies. Corruption of the rpm database can happen if not careful.

Easy way
Yum might be the easier way to do this. Lots of info here on yum.

Medium difficult way:
The following is use at your own risk. I would backup before trying.

1. Find all the rpms you want to reinstall.
2. Make sure you have maching versions of the ones you want to reinstall.
3. Put only these rpms in an empty directory
3. You need to be in runlevel 3 (non gui level, Mandrake may use other). comamnd ' init 3 ' in your virtual terminal 1 when you press Alt-Ctrl_F1 key combination.
4. In the directory where you have the rpms run the command ' rpm -Uvh *.rpm --force '

The Harder manual way is as follow:
The following is use at your own risk. I would backup before trying.

1. Find all the rpms you want to remove.
2. Make sure you have maching versions of the ones you want to remove.
3. You need to be in runlevel 3 (non gui level, Mandrake may use other). comamnd ' init 3 ' in your virtual terminal 1 when you press Alt-Ctrl_F1 key combination.
4. Use the command ' rpm -e <name-of-rpm-minus-the-.rpm-extension> --nodeps --force
Example ' rpm -e kdebase --nodeps --force ' The --force may not be needed.
5. Once all rpms are removed install the fresh ones.
6. Use command ' rpm -ivh kdebase*.rpm '
If you have all the rpms you are going to put back in a directory of all of them then run the command ' rpm -ivh *.rpm '.

Brian
 
Old 11-22-2005, 09:46 PM   #9
wslyhbb
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Thanks, I will try that. I appreciate all of your help. If that does not work I guess I will just reinstall Mandriva.

I think it really is a slightly corrupt KDE. I think it all began when KDE tried to through a notification (sound) and something failed, KDE seemed to have froze and I rebooted, ext3fs recovered the journal and I think it must have gotten rid of some small important file. I seem to actually have three problems. While for the most part everything seems normal, like I said in root KDE continuously throughs it crash dialog, in my personal user my Mandriva Online does not seem to initialize, and the sound does not initialize.

So I think my two options are try to reinstall KDE or reinstall Mandriva :-(. Guess I will see what I can get done over Thanksgiving.
 
Old 11-22-2005, 10:02 PM   #10
Brian1
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Before reinstalling make sure you backup bookamrks and any needed config files to floppy or cdr. If going to reinstall try installing without formatting partitions except /root if it is a partition of its own. That might do it without losing data. Just trying to make your reinstall quicker.

Good luck
Brian1
 
Old 11-22-2005, 10:11 PM   #11
wslyhbb
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Yeah ok, I partitioned into three partitions /, /usr, and /home. From what I had read / only really needs 100MB, /usr a 1.1GB, and /home the rest, so that is what I did.

Oh well and I have a 1.2GB hard drive for the swap partition :-P. Ok you might call me crazy but logically I think it would be better if the virtual memory had its own read/write heads, so the virtual memory and reading stuff from disk are seperate. However, I probably end up nullifying the benefit because my main hard drive is a 7200 RPM and the old hard drives are only 5400 RPM.
 
Old 11-23-2005, 08:27 PM   #12
Brian1
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Using swap on a different drive can help use. If swap partition size is 1.2gig that is extremely large. In the old days when memory was expensive it was taught that swap should be twice your ram. Example. 32meg memory. 64 meg swap. But as computers have increase speeds in cpu, memeory, bus sizes, harddrive speeds, faster interfaces, and the cheap cost of ram, the need for double size swaps has declined in its need. I usually never make swap over 256meg since if it does start using it, it will be slower than real ram.

Just to make sure when I mention /root, I did not mean /. I just met delete /root if it is a partition. If it is just a directory you can still delete it and keep /home. Only issue I see keeping home is possiable user id number may not make the new user created. If /home partition is large enough you could create a directory called maybe /home/backup. Copy your user data from you user account to /home/backup. Then delete your everthing else in /home except for /backup. Then when you reinstall do not format the /home partition. Now after the install one can restore needed files. Just a thought here. I always try my best not to have to work so hard on a reinstall of a distro.

As far as the size of / I would increase that. Reason is you have the /var directory and logs are stored there. Mail can be there. If using and update program it could store the files there as well. If you want to see what your current setup is using run the following commands as root.
' df -h ' This command shows partition space in a readable format.

' du / -k | sort -n > ~/info.txt ' This command will show how much data is in each directory, sort it from largest to smallest, and then puts its output in your home directory and calls it info.txt. You can scroll through the text file and see when you get to say just /var and see how much data is in it.

' du / -k | sort -n | grep var ' Same as above but only outputs var links to the screen. It prints the the largest last and usually /var should be the last one listed in kilobytes.

Change ' du / -k ' to ' du / -m ' to read in megabytes.

Brian
 
Old 11-23-2005, 09:08 PM   #13
wslyhbb
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Well I already tried reinstalling the .rpms, didn't help, so I tried reinstalling everything but the /home, however, I did not move my current user. When it reinstalled it seemed to have known about my user, I gave the user a password and when the system was booted I logged in. Everything was there, only problem was now I was getting the continuous KDE crash in my own user as well. So I scrapped everything and reinstalled from scratch. Everything is great now.
I have 1GB of RAM in the computer, so nothing ever swaps anyhow, and the swap drive is an old 1.2GB, so I am just using the whole drive as the swap drive. Old drives that small are good for nothing else, at least they are good for something more than a paper weight :-).

As for my partition sizes, I guess I had not remembered them right. I made my / 1.1GB and my /usr 6GB, and my /home the rest. I use KDiskFree to see my partition sizes, and they are as follows:
/ 825MB free of 1.1GB
/usr 2.9GB free of 6GB
/home 8.5GB free of 11.4GB

Hehe, yeah I am only using a 20GB hard drive on this computer right now :-P. Actually according to those numbers, I might be better off reducing my / and expanding my /usr.
 
Old 11-23-2005, 09:57 PM   #14
Brian1
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Glad to see you have it going and all before Turkey Day.

Have a Happy Thanksgiving.
Brian
 
Old 11-25-2005, 08:20 AM   #15
bitinho
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Hi everybody.
I had the same problem.
In another thread (I'm not sure if in this forum) and by another reason I read to uninstall "kat". I did it.
Coincidence or not? I don't know... Yesterday I tried logon as root and... no more KDE crashes!

Good Bytes

José Ribeiro
 
  


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