I missed up my kde installation on my mandrake 10.0 and now kde desktop won't load right on boot. Its totally screwed. How can I rescue it or reinstall it with the CD's?

Thanks,

Jack

The easiest way...

[CTRL][ALT][F1]

Log in as root

kill off the DM process...

service dm stop

uninstall ALL KDE programs...

First list all installed KDE rpm's to a file...

rpm -qa > filelist.txt

Now uninstall ALL KDE programs...

rpm -e `rpm -qa | grep kde `

If it barfs, uninstall the items that it claims must be uninstalled first...

Then make sure that the above runs to completion.

Remove ALL kde related hidden files...

rm -rf ~/.kde

Also remove them for the users...

cd /home/USERNAME
rm -rf .kde

cd

Now re-install KDE

urpmi kde kdm kdenetwork

insert the disks as prompted....

WAIT 4-8 minutes AFTER it's done.

Then restart the DM...


service dm start

Log in as before.

Now you will be missing a slew of KDE applictions...

Run "install software" and SEARCH for KDE...

Install the listed programs, log out, then back in.

Done.

Another option: just re-install Mandrake altogether from scratch...

Thanks, I started to implement your instructions and ran into a snag at the "rpm -e `rpm -qa | grep kde `" part; said something about it not existing. The rest looked pretty long and drawn out so I decided to do an upgrade to 10.1 and see how that works.

I wanted to recover kde because I have other software that I have painfully installed over the past year I didn't want to lose. Good thing I kept notes on how I overcame my installation problems. If I go through a new install I am going to upgrade

Thanks for the advice.
jack

Eh, either you did not have KDE installed...

e.g.

rpm -qa | grep kde

does not return any result

or you mistyped.

rpm -qa

lists all install packages

|

(verticle bar) passes the result to what follows which is grep

grep looks for KDE in the names (note maybe it should have been KDE instead?) and spits out those RPM's which ONLY contain KDE in the name...


By putting it in quotes this is excuted prior to the rpm -e command and passed to it.

rpm -e

in turn gets the list of installed KDE packages and deletes them.

All of this is done in one command.

COOL!