Re: [gentoo-user] KDE won't start up....

[Michael Mol <mikemol@gmail.com>]

Andrew Lowe wrote:
> Hi all,
>     I had a running KDE 4 setup and this afternoon did an:
> 
> emerge -NuD world
> 
> There were no errors reported, the kernel source had been updated, so I
> compiled the new kernel, and copied it into place, recompiled my nvidia
> driver and also evdev drivers and then rebooted the machine. Now, the
> machine boots up, I get all the usual booting messages, starting ntp,
> mounting drives, getting IP addresses, exporting nfs and so on, the
> screen goes black, the hour glass of the KDE log in screen briefly
> appears then the screen is blanked and I'm back at a text login.
> 
>     I've logged into the machine from the text login and recompiled the
> kernel, copied it into place, recompiled nvidia and evdev and still the
> problem persists. I've looked at the xorg & kdm logs and there are  a
> few errors there that google searches seem to say are OK. The thing that
> is confusing is that when at the text prompt, I can start up bog
> standard X via "startx" and the mouse and keyboard work but I can't get
> KDE to start. Does anyone have any ideas as to what could be causing
> this problem? Any thoughts on where, besides the two obvious logs, that
> I can try and track down what's going wrong here, or steps I can take to
> debug the KDE startup?
> 
>     Any thoughts greatly appreciated,
> 
>         Andrew
> 

Anything in ~/.xsession-errors?

I wonder if KDE's {window manager|session manager} is failing out. I
don't know KDE very well, but that's what it sounds like.