SuSE 8.0 KDE 3.0 Crashing Out to Login Panel

[robnelli]

I've got SuSE 8.0 up and running successfully on the slave drive of a dual boot system (Win98SE). I've upgraded the SuSE and KDE components to the latest releases using YAST2 Online Update. Quite often when I'm in KDE, the system will crash and kick me out to the Login prompt. It appears to happen most often when I'm using the mouse aggressively (i.e. rapid mouse clicks) or multitasking (opening new shells while other apps or shells are starting up). Where should I look to find specific error messages from the crash? All I'm seeing is a cryptic message in the console after the crash:

linux kdm [1435]: Server for display: 0 terminat

This problem invariably occurs within 15 minutes of activity. I've messed around with some of the other desktop environments (wm, etc.) and they didn't seem to show this behavior. They never crashed out.

[Dolda2000]

The errors are probably in the log from the X server, /var/log/XFree86.0.log. It's not really that simple, though, since kdm restarts the X server as soon as it terminates, so that the new X server overwrites the old logs (this is fixed in newer versions of the X server, though). Anyway, you'll need to "cd /var/log; mv XFree86.0.log XFree86.0.log.error". That way, you can look at /var/log/XFree86.0.log.error after X crashes to see what's wrong. I can tell you one thing, though, specifically that it's not because you're multitasking. That's handled in Linux, not in X. Probably this is something with the drivers that you're using.