My KDE Crashes

[sam_linux]

Hello All ...
I am using Mandrake 10.0 . It has a KDE 2.1 gui .
It was working fine untill recently. Last weeek I tried to install rythmbox.
I failed and I see some frustrating behaviour of KDE after that. When I try to open home, the window opens up and crashes. Same with web browsers.
Each time I need to restart the machine. I tried to google this , but I haven't found a single answer for this problem. Any one has any idea what is happenning? Do I have to reinstall my KDE ? please help!!!

sam

[fingal]

Hi Sam

Sounds like it might be a problem with your X server. That's what gives you the frames and display stuff around browsers and desktop applications.

I'm not great at fixing X problems, but I think it would be a good idea to check your log files for that.

Ever used a terminal? You need to open one up and cd into /var/log like this:

cd /var/log

Then figure out which version of X you have. Mine is Xorg, so I would - as root - do this:

cat Xorg.0.log | tail -30

That's saying, 'Display the contents of the Xorg log file, but limit it to the last 30 lines'. Any errors should show up.

I would be curious enough to run the top command as well (after trying to start up 'Home') ... Perhaps a process is trying to start up, failing and hogging system resources. It would show up somewhere near the top of the screen as a memory or CPU hog.

Probably installing rhythmbox has left some cruft on your system which needs removing. Finding it could be a challenge!

- fingal