[Nottingham] lost kde after changing display settings

[Alan Pope]

On 22/06/05, Sarah Swindell <windyswindy at hotmail.com> wrote:
> I tried changing the display settings in KDE (I think I ticked something
> like "support NVIDIA drivers". I realise with hindsight that this was a
> mistake) and am now only presented with a command prompt "tty1" asking me
> for my username and password. I can't get KDE to start up at all.
> 

There should be a log file of X starting up in /var/log. Usually
called something like Xorg.0.log or XFree86.0.log (depending on
whether you have xorg or XFree86 installed). You can view it with the
"more" command. Just type "more" followed by the name of the file.

> I've signed into the tty1 prompt but have no idea how to change the display
> settings back. I've had a look into the help topics but am none the wiser.
> (The only command I know is "LS" which I don't think is going to help.)
> I am hoping to avoid having to do a fresh install of linux (Mepis, Debian
> based).
> any ideas how to fix it?
> 

Chances are whatever you clicked, it's screwed around with the
/etc/X11/xorg.conf or /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 file (depending on whether
you have xorg or XFree86 installed). With any luck it created a backup
of that file. You can use the cp command to copy the one you have to
your own backup, then copy the backup one (look for the timestamp on
the file by doing "ls -ltr /etc/X11") over the top of your current
one.

You can also try editing the file using a nice text editor like nano
or jed (or a horrid one like vim or emacs). If you don't have either
editor then you could "apt-get install jed" (or nano) to get it (you
will need to either prepend sudo to that command or be logged in as
root to do it).

In that file look at the section "Device".. here's mine, I have an
NVidia card, and am using the stock "nv" driver (which works) as
opposed to the one from the NVidia site which at the moment for me
doesn't.

Section "Device"
        Identifier      "NVIDIA Corporation NV20 [GeForce3]"
        Driver          "nv"
        BusID           "PCI:1:0:0"
EndSection

You can play with that file (assuming you DO actually have an NVidia
card? [lspci tells you what card you have]) and try starting x again
with the "startx" command.

Again check the log mentioned at the top to see why it's failed.

Cheers,
Al.