white screen problem... with a twist

[jlfessler]

Greetings. I recently ventured into preupgrade going from FC8 to FC10, which worked like a champ. All seemed in order until I went to change the silly background. As mentioned in other threads here, the screen went white... but then a moment later, it went completely black. I think it's still alive since random mouse clicks elicit HD activity - or so it seems. Now, each reboot goes from the KDE fade-in image directly to the black screen.

The video card is an old nv897.0 4x, but it serves the purpose for now, and the damnable shame of it is that it was working just fine until I mucked around with the desktop effects.

Is there any way to manually undo the KDE desktop settings, say from a command line?

Regards,
-Joe

[rtdrury]

You might stop in the boot sequence at a maintenance console and move your kde config directories (~/.kde*) to /tmp or somewhere to later salvage your good settings. It may be useful to switch to gnome temporarily. Put a switchdesk GNOME in right before startx in your startx script. Or locate and disable that script and type in the switchdesk & startx at the command line after login.

[jlfessler]

I thank you, rtdrury... dropping .kde and starting from scrach might seem drastic, but that cleared the issue. I tried several iterations of this procedure, each time changing a single item in the desktop effects and it seems peculiar to setting the background. However, I also got into the same fix after moving the taskbar from the botton to the left-hand side, only with this, the entire screen was covered by the taskbar. There seemed to be no way to adjust its width. Most peculiar.

Thanks again.

-J