Uh....oh...

[lucyjean]

I have just started using Mandrake, a switch from Windows, and have managed to really mess things up somehow.

OK, I've been fiddling with all the stuff ...changing decorations and themes and all that. Now, my KDE desktop won't do much at all. It has no panel bar and the only thing I get when I do any kind of click is a menu offering to adjust colors...nothing else. I can't do anything.

It seems like everytime I log in, it's all changed. In Konqueror, the web page display is HUGE.. If I reset the font sizes to get a normal view, everything is microscopic everywhere else. Right now, I can hardly see what I'm typing but the rest of the stuff on this page is really big. I can only see one post at a time.

These window managers are confusing me. I wanted to try GNOME with one of the other ones but the one one I can find is Sawfish. I know that KDE and GNOME are kind of like program managers...they come with applications and all that. Some of the others don't.

Sawfish has a really nice configuration menu. I say Sawfish because that's where I saw it. It's a window with buttons for all the different sub-categories for customizing your desktop. When I'm in GNOME, that nice menu doesn't come up. In some of the other window managers, it does. It's called WPrefs, I think.

Is it just not good to run a KDE app in another window manager and visa versa? Is that what's making everything look so funny? I did unclick the option in KDE about applying it's own colors to non-KDE apps.

You probably get my drift by now. This is just really bugging me... :confused:

[scanez]

If you want to restore KDE to how it was originally, you can probably do so by deleting the configuration directories from your home directory so that they get recreated like they were the first time you used KDE. You can do this with

rm -r ~/.kde*

Using KDE apps in other desktop/window managers shouldn't affect how they work in KDE itself so this should do the trick...I think :)

[lucyjean]

Hey, thanks for the info. And...Congrats to you. My neice is in her last year at Berkley and she loves it.

BTW....what's galois theory?

L :D

[scanez]

Originally posted by lucyjean:
<STRONG>Hey, thanks for the info. And...Congrats to you. My neice is in her last year at Berkley and she loves it.

BTW....what's galois theory?

L :D</STRONG>
Hey thanks a lot :) Grad school is going to kick major..., well you know what

In algebra there are these objects called groups and then there are these objects called field extensions. If you look at the set of certain functions of a field extension called automorphisms that fix the base field, then this set forms a group called the Galois group of the extension. Galois theory deals with the relationship between the subgroups of this Galois group and the subfields of the field extension, amazing because these are two seperate mathematical objects that would seem to have no obvious connection, but Evariste Galois in the early 1800's showed that they do :) Galois theory has many applications, probably the most common is in saying which polynomials are "solvable by radicals", i.e. which polynomials can have their roots expressed using only the regular operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and taking roots.

Hehe, I'm not sure if any of this makes sense but it really is an amazing and beautiful area in mathematics, one I will most definately study further in grad school :)

[lucyjean]

Well, it's done it again. This happens when I try to change the style in Look and Feel. Since there is no preview, I have to click OK and it changes everything. If I try to look at more then about two different styles, my desktop turns white, the icons stay, the panel goes. I no longer have access to any applications.

What should I look at to try to figure this out? :mad:

[lucyjean]

P. S. I have no access to anything as far as the console, etc. either. I got Konqueror up because I have a desktop icon for the Mandrakestore.

[camelrider]

ctl+alt+f2 should get you to a plain console.
ctl+alt+f7 will return to the X-windows GUI.
I guess you can do the rm -r ~/.kde* again at the console and only try ONE change at a time. Then at least you'll have an idea what hosed your GUI. :D

[Disc0stoo]

My advice is to NOT use kde. Try GNOME, or anything else for that matter. I'll bet there'll be tons of wm's on your Mandrake CD's. Try 'em all, don't just stick with KDE because it's the default. Search for Enlightenment, Fluxbox, WindowMaker, Afterstep, the list goes on and on...

[Ludootje]

What version of mandrake & kde is that?
To see the KDE version, type this in a console:
konqueror --version
Than it will show you the version of kde, qt & konqueror. Only the version of kde is important though.

[lucyjean]

I've got kde 2.2.2 and Mandrake 8.2 downloaded from wherever I got it. I've got QT 2 I think. Can't figure out why all the crashes though.