[Nottingham] lost kde after changing display settings

[David Aldred]

On Wednesday 22 June 2005 19:47, Sarah Swindell 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.

Did you actually do this from within KDE?  If not, then the answer from Alan 
that pinged into my mailbox as I was typing this is probaly the way to go.

I can't find any similar setting to that in my KDE setup screens, but if you 
did change something in KDE's settings while logged into KDE as an ordinary 
user, you can try renaming the hidden directory where KDE stores your 
settings, and see if that sorts it out (KDE should then start up with a 
default setup).

When you log in on your tty1, do this (type what is after the '#' below):

# pwd

This should confirm that you're working in your own home directory It tells 
you your *p*resent *w*orking *d*irectory - on mine it responds with 

/home/david

Then type 

#  mv .kde .kdeold

(mv is 'move', but does renaming too).

You won't get any output, but your .kde directory (which is where KDE keeps 
its settings) will have been renamed to .kdeold .   That means that KDE can't 
find it when it starts up - so it rebuilds its own set of settings based on 
the defaults. 

# startx

should then start the x-server and KDE should launch within it. 

Some applications keep important stuff in the .kde directory structure (a Bad 
Thing To Do, in my opinion!), though, so if you find you've lost the mail you 
had in KMail or something, you may need to copy back some of the stuff from 
what is now your .kdeold directory into the new .kde directory.   But if you 
have KDE working again you can do that with Konqueror. 

-- 
David Aldred