KDM won't let me log in after switching KDE theme from oxygen

Command Line Fu · 2009-05-21 10:56:37

I recently did a fresh install of Arch, after X.org 1.6.x and KDE 4.2.3 had already been put in the official repositories. Everything seemed to be working fine up until I tried to change my KDE them from oxygen to something else(I can't remember exactly which one I switched to). Right after I clicked "apply", I was booted back to the KDM login screen.

Now, when I try to log into my KDE desktop from the KDM, I get kicked back to the KDM log-in screen, so I can't log into my desktop. The exact moment I get kicked back to the KDM screen is when the first icon pops up when KDE is loading(I believe the icon looks like a hard drive). My hardware consists of an Asus P5K3 Deluxe Motherboard with an Intel P35 chipset and an Nvidia 8800GT video card.

I have done quite a bit of tinkering to try and figure out what the problem is. I had a lot of features enabled in my xorg.conf file that the wiki suggests should be used for nvidia cards. I have stripped it down to what I would think is the bare minimum for troubleshooting, commenting out all the fancy stuff like TrippleBuffer, DamageEvents, EnablePageFlip, RenderAccel, and BackingStore(which i have tried commented out, as well as set to "true" and "false). Had no luck here.

I have also tweaked around with the /etc/inittab, making sure it starts at run level 5 and have un-commented the part at the very bottom for KDE. my ~/.xinitrc file also has, as the only un-commented line, "exec startkde".

As far as my /etc/rc.conf goes, it looks as such:

DAEMONS=(syslog-ng hal network crond)

I do not load alsa because I have a Creative X-Fi card and as far as i know, neither alsa nor OSS4.1 seem to work at all with that card.

I think its worth pointing out I have added the kdm daemon to rc.conf, uncommented the kdm section in inittab, as well as tried both individually and still no dice.

I also went to the trouble of removing all kde packages with the pacman command that removes the entire kde suite, including dependencies that won't break pacakages as well as configuration files. Even after doing that and totally reinstalling kde 4.2.3 from scratch, the problem persists.

Because the problem started before I started messing with my config files, and because there has been no improvements as of yet by doing so, I have a hunch that it has nothing to do with these things. Everything was working fine up until I used the KDE control center to change from oxygen to another theme that started causing this problem.

It will be easy to reverse the tinkering I've done because I remember everything I did. It just seems like something broke when I tried to to change the KDE theme from oxygen to something else, and I have no idea how to reset things back to the way they were before I changed that option.

I would really appreciate any insight to this issue, I dug around the wiki and searched the forums for hours, and although some people had problems similar to mine, their solutions did not work for me.

pano · 2009-05-21 17:45:32

what does your Xorg.0.log say?
I had a similar problem and it was related to X crashing...

FrozenFox · 2009-05-21 18:46:56

A simple way to check whether or not it is your user's files that are causing a problem is to make a new "test" user with sudo adduser and try to log in as that one. If it works, it's local files. If it fails in the same way, xorg.conf or a packaging problem are highly likely.

If your user files are indeed the problem, you can change the [Theme] in $HOME/.kde4/share/config/plasmarc back to oxygen.
My usual means of weeding out problems is move/removing ~/.local ~/.config ~/.kde* ~/.qt [ and for gtk theme issues ~/.gtk* ~/.gnome*] and any other folder I can think of that appears to be linked to a DE.

Also, have you seen...

aur/ctxfi 1.00-4 (20)
Audio driver for the X-Fi and X-Fi Titanium series

From what I understand, this allows for x-fi cards in alsa, and ossv4 I am relatively sure (not being a user of such myself) that a bunch of the x-fi series cards were supposed to work long before this driver was released.

Last edited by FrozenFox (2009-05-21 18:48:32)

Command Line Fu · 2009-05-21 22:25:29

The problem turned out to be my user files. I followed your advice and created a test user like you recommended and was able to log in. However, the $HOME/.kde4/share/config/plasmarc file only contained a few lines of data, mostly relating to widgets I had put on my taskbar. It didn't contain a theme section or anything that looked like it could have caused the problem. Still, I made sure the contents of that file in my main user's home directory matched the test users file, and as I expected based on how little data was in that file it didn't affect my problem.

Now that we have isolated the problem down to the user files, what is the best way to further isolate the problem and/or fix it? Should I remove the ~/.local ~/.config ~/.kde* ~/.qt file folders like you mentioned and then reinstall KDE? Or remove my main user account using the userdel -r command as root then re-create it using adduser? I would like to know where the file containing the [Theme] section is that you mentioned since it was not in the plasmarc file.

FrozenFox · 2009-05-23 11:27:25

It's supposed to be in plasmarc. It has been since 4.0, and still is there as of 4.3 beta 1. Perhaps that line is only added when you change themes? I'm not sure, really. For me on 4.3 beta 1, it looks like:

[Theme]
name=Elegance

near the end of the file, with the Elegance theme installed. Try adding that, but changing it to oxygen/Oxygen (donno which)?

EDIT: Just switched to Oxygen here to test -- it turns out, when Oxygen is selected, [Theme] disappears instead of uses name=Oxygen or something. Interesting.. so that presumably wouldn't be the issue for you.

If kde is working properly on a test account, you won't need to reinstall anything, it wouldn't do any good afaict.

If I were you, I'd move all of those folders at once and rename them to something like ~/.foldernameOLD and try logging in. If it works, *copy* them back individually (best) or in pairs (quickest). If it doesn't work, there's something else lurking about, so perhaps in that case you could show us ls -a ~/

Last edited by FrozenFox (2009-05-23 11:27:48)

Arch Linux

#1 2009-05-21 10:56:37

KDM won't let me log in after switching KDE theme from oxygen

#2 2009-05-21 17:45:32

Re: KDM won't let me log in after switching KDE theme from oxygen

#3 2009-05-21 18:46:56

Re: KDM won't let me log in after switching KDE theme from oxygen

#4 2009-05-21 22:25:29

Re: KDM won't let me log in after switching KDE theme from oxygen

#5 2009-05-23 11:27:25

Re: KDM won't let me log in after switching KDE theme from oxygen

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