January 7, 2004

Hello all!

After successfully running Slackware and KDE 3.0 on my laptop for the better part of a year, now, after some patches and upgrading, KDE (3.1.14) no longer runs.

The basic problem:
After booting, as always, to the command line and logging in, running 'startx' now gets only as far as the window manager screen, with the message "Could not start kdeinit. Check your installation." Upon returning to the terminal, several k files (e.g. kreadconfig, ksplash, kdeinit) report " relocation error: /opt/kde/lib/libkdefx.so.4: undefined symbol: ____ " The symbol for most is _ZN12QPaintDevice13setResolutonEi, but the offending file libkdefx.so.4 is always the same.

System facts, and what has just been done:
-- IBM Thinkpad 600
-- Original Linux install was Slackware 8.1, kernel 2.4.18 (ca. Nov-Dec 2002)
-- Several months ago I patched the kernel to 2.4.19, then 2.4.20
-- Just now, I patched the kernel successively to 2.4.21, 2.4.22, and 2.4.23 (without compiling at intermediate stages, but patches were applied in order).

-- 2.4.23 worked just fine (leave aside a new sound problem on the Thinkpad)...
-- ... and I just learned of swaret (a work of wonder), with which I could upgrade the system to Slackware 9.1 without doing a complete wipe and reinstall. After several days of frustration and confusion, I came to understand swaret. Gingerly, I undertook to update and upgrade, and in fact all appeared to work magically well. But rebooting and running startx turned up the failure in kdeinit.

I've seen 2 or 3 posts here reporting failures in kdeinit, but the closest were failures in different files, and none has included an explanation or clear solution to the problem. But they make me now think that the problem is not a bug in the latest KDE.

Can anyone suggest what needs to be done to fix this problem? Would it be advisable to do a 'removepkg' on all the kde packages, then reinstall those packages? Swaret had reported that all the dependencies (at least for KDE related stuff) were intact. I should note that I have very little room to work with on the system, the various partitions being nearly as full as eggs at this point.

Thanks for whatever light anyone can shed on the problem.

==Mel Strom

KDE is highly version dependent. You cannot run a mixture of KDE versions. If you mix KDE versions then you get weird errors and

"" relocation error: /opt/kde/lib/libkdefx.so.4: undefined symbol: ____ " The symbol for most is _ZN12QPaintDevice13setResolutonEi, but the offending file libkdefx.so.4 is always the same."

sure looks like one of those. This strict dependency also extends to Qt. You have to have matching KDE and Qt versions.

"Would it be advisable to do a 'removepkg' on all the kde packages, then reinstall those packages? Swaret had reported that all the dependencies (at least for KDE related stuff) were intact."

Is Swaret smart enough to check version number dependencies? If package A version 3.2.1 depends on package B 3.2.1 does Swaret check for package B or package B 3.2.1?

___________________________________
Be prepared. Create a LifeBoat CD.
http://users.rcn.com/srstites/LifeBo...home.page.html

Steve Stites

I ran into this same error today on Arch Linux (Could not start kdeinit, please check your installation). I re-installed qt and it works, the error went away.

rberry88