Help - my root desktop has forgotten it's settings but my standard user login (non root) hasn't. I run 10.2 and have been tinkering with Xorg.conf (both manually and through xorgconfig) - following Dugan Chens advice from http://www.vcn.bc.ca/~dugan/setting-up-slackware.html. I have been trying to get my ATI Xpert98 vid card to direct render as in the section "Setting Up X" but gave up. I am not critising his instructions but I am a completet novice with Linux ! I then moved on to "Adding Truetype Fonts" and dloaded the freetype-2.1.10-i486-1arf.tgz package and installed with Kpackage. After some fishing around in KDE I figured some sort of build/compile/manual setup was needed and searched for scripts/bins in the file list of the tgz. Then when logging in as root then running startx the desktop was altered - icons larger, panel lost its transperency, new large hover bubble appeared over the K stat button etc - these are not program errors buts different desktop appearance to my much loved settings. Logging in as my standard test user (no special rights) then starting X returned my desktop to my preferences. As you can tell I'm a total novice to Nix (although accomplished with Win) but I'm struggling up the learning curve and determined to get it coined. Any advice is welcome.

If I understand your post right, you are logging in to X as root. Why? I don't do that. If I need to do something as root I open a terminal and su. Am I missing something?

Hi bgeddy,

While I can't be much for you this time 'round. Here are some things you can do to make life easier for youself in the future.

1. Make a backup of any config file before you change it
2. Keep a ChangeLog of any changes you make to the system

Dennisk

Yes you shouldnt be running kde as root. Just use root for admin stuff like installing software etc., which can mostly be done from a terminal.

Thanks for the prompt response guys. Yes - I know I shouldn't run KDE as root (slapped wrist) but I would be interested to see why roots KDE has changed and not users ? I wish I had made a changelog and backups but I haven't ( Doh ! ).
Still I would like to know what affects users settings in KDE. ( I've looked into .xinitrc in home dirs) - please help !!

Thanks

All of KDE's settings are found in ~/.kde/. For root this would be /root/.kde/. To see what files have changed recently, do
where X is an integer representing days. "-atime -X" means less than X days and "-atime +X" means greater than X days. Hopefully it'll return a small enough number of files for you to dig through.