Can't switch to KDE, huge logon screen, icon text

[Guest]

Hi folks,
I did a netinstall of Sarge with 2.6 a couple of weeks ago. I've got a few problems, hence the wordy title.

1. If I try to launch KDE from the login manager I get a few seconds of something happening, then a huge dialogue box that I can't read except for the 'OK' button (I could make out some text one time, just the word 'DHCP' - I'm not using DHCP). Then the screen just stays grey and I have to ctrl-alt-bkspc to the login screen. There's nothing in /var/mesages to help, and ~.kde just contains 3 empty directories - I'm assuming there'd be more in there if my first KDE login was in any way successful.

2. The login screen is huge, and I have to move the mose around to get to the options on the bottom of the screen. The dialogue box in point 1 above is of this size. Once I'm in Gnome everything's fine, and I'm in lovely 1152x864. I'm using a TNT2 on a 15" LG575N CRT.

3. A minor niggle: I've resized my desktop icons in Gnome to my liking, but the text under the icons spills onto 2 lines. Just a minor thing, but it looks a bit silly.

I'd be grateful for any help!

[Harold]

Humor me, please. Add a new user, log on as new user, and launch KDE. If KDE launches normally, then we know that the problem is a corrupted file somewhere in your home directory. I suggest this course of action because this problem happened to me a couple of years ago.

Guest> I'm using a TNT2
Hmm... Old... Shouldn't be a problem (other than slow redraw) but who knows.

[Guest2]

I have the same problem with KDM/KDE on my widescreen LCD. No problem on other 4:3 monitors. I think it has something to do with the XFree86.conf/xorg.conf. If you manage to find a solution, please let us know.

[foomonster]

Thanks for the replies. I tried logging in as a new user, but it was the same.

Funnily enough I demo'd Debian a few weeks before doing a proper install, and the logon screen was fine. That was on 2.4 kernel which I upgraded through apt to 2.6 This time I installed 2.6 from the start. I wonder if that's got any relevance?

[inconnu]

Funnily enough I demo'd Debian a few weeks before doing a proper install, and the logon screen was fine. That was on 2.4 kernel which I upgraded through apt to 2.6 This time I installed 2.6 from the start. I wonder if that's got any relevance?

I don't know, but I installed with the "linux26" for the 2.6 kernel (2.6.8-2-386, I think), and had no real problems with it; then later installed the 2.6.8-2-686 kernel, again with no problems.

Initially, I did have to edit the XF86Config-4 file to get 1024x768, though. But in my case the wrong resolution (800x600?) didn't mess up the login screen, it just made the fonts too large.

[Guest]

I had to edit the XF86Config-4 to get 1152x864 as well... I wonder if that was it.