Hi,

I've installed Mandrake 9.1 on my second HDD. At first, everything was OK but later, when I logged in with my user account, the desktop (KDE 3.1) icons didn't show (or they disappeared). I can't click on desktop but I can use the menus in taskbar, without any problem.

One more thing: I try to open Home directory. It appears on the screen for 1-2 seconds and suddenly flies away!

What's going on? Did I do something wrong? I'm not an experienced user, so I don't know what to do.

I'd be happy if you help me

Thanks.

Are you using the root account? because when I login to the root account with gui I also can't see the icons or click on the desktop. Login to a normal user account and see if it's the same. But this might not the problem because you have a fly away window problem that I had never heard of.

No, I'm not using the root account. I created two user accounts to test if the same problem would occur in both. I have the same problem with these two accounts.

And, as you know, it's not allowed to start graphical interface when you use the root account.

I'm really stuck and I've no idea.

I think I'm gonna try to uninstall Mandrake but I don't know how (yeah, poor me ).

How can I delete LILO's main screen from the first sector of my HDD? If I uninstall MDRK, would it be deleted automatically, or do I have to delete it manually?

Little help for this dummy, please!

lilo will still be there after uninstall. You can use the mandrake install CD to get rid of it. press F2 at the startup, and then type rescue at the prompt. You'll get a menu and choose 'restore DOS mbr' or something like that.

as for your strange problem, empty your home directory (*all* files including the hidden ones) except for the files starting with .bash (note the . ; it's a hidden file). and then see what happens when you log in.

newbie advice here ( i am the newbie) fdisk /mbr i

sorry this is second attempt at this reply; i am a newbie, so be warned that my advice may be incomplete, etc. The DOS command fdisk /mbr will wipe lilo from the "master boot record". this command is undocumented. I learned it after a month of trying to eliminate a virus from a win 3.1 system. I had cleaned virus using Norton or something and I still could only boot using a floppy to which I had copied autoexec.bat and config.sys, and so on.

It took some guts to type that fdisk /mbr command but lo and behold it wiped the boot sector virus hiding on the master boot sector and straight away, I could boot from the hard drive to a C:\ prompt.

the next time I needed it was to prepare for a reload of Linux on a partitioned hard drive on which I had Win98SE on half the drive and Linux on the other half. I ran the fdisk /mbr command again and held my breath and it got rid of lilo, so that when I rebooted it just went to the Win98SE load up straight away. I do not know if you can use this given your situation but there is an fdisk command (or several of them) in Linux.

anyway hope this at least did not add confusion, robertn

Once I had the same problem. After searching I realised that the problem was the x server (the graphic server) that was crashing. In the kde control center you can change the cursor icons but in the list of cursor icons are also some icons that are not for the cursor. This causes the x server to crash. If you changed the cursor icons try to use others form the list (choose only those that have a little cursor icon next to them).and restart the x server (kde) with cntrl+alt+backspace . If the problem is not fixed after that then the probem should be the icon theme you use so go to the control center-icons and change it (and restart kde again).