Hello,
I recently ran into a problem with my install. I accidentally messed with the bottom panel in my KDE on my root account. This caused my desktop to freeze up. Every time I attempt to restart into my root, it loads, but is completely frozen. Is there some way I can overwrite my KDE config files without starting X server or from a standard user account?

Cheers

Don't ever log in to X windows as root. That's a REALLY bad idea, and note that you *NEVER* *EVER* have to do this.

1 members found this post helpful.

It's typically a bad idea to log into your GUI as root. Use the su and sudo commands to temporarily get root privileges when logged in as a normal user.

Yes, using the command line.

One option is to open a konsole terminal window and use su - to login as root. The dash will ensure you login with root's environment and home directory rather than the environment of your user account.

If you don't use the dash you still can use su to login as root. Just remember to change to root's $HOME directory (cd /root) because without the dash, the terminal session will be in your user acccount's home directory. You probably do not want to delete the .kde directory from there.

Another option is to boot the system in run level 3 and login as root.

In either case, from there you can rename root's $HOME/.kde directory (or delete if you don't care about losing settings).

When you next start X as root KDE will create a new default desktop. You will have to re-tweak your settings to your comfort, but if you rename the existing directory you will be able to copy most of the KDE configuration files. Just don't copy those files associated with the panel.

Your KDE config files are in ~/.kde. Just rename or delete that directory. That can be easily done from the command line.

i've been logging into kde as root since version 10. updating user accounts and operating on user files with permission changes, etc... is just plain simpler with the kde apps. when it comes to managing network interfaces with wicd, that must be done through the gui. there are no hand edited config files for wicd. with earlier versions of slack, there were a lot of things in X that wouldn't work when logged in as root, but that seems to have been changed in more recent versions. i still do most of my root stuff from a terminal window su'ing from a regular user account, but there are just some things that have to be done logged in AS root, and some of them either MUST be done in a gui, or may go smoother in X using gui apps. one in particular i have run into is the TI DSP compiler, where it must be done in a gui logged in as root. su'ing or sudo'ing just doesn't cut it, as the installer gets hung up on file permissions and executable permissions. and it's a gui installer as well.

Have you tried that with kdesu?