I managed to muck up my system. I use the filemanager in superuser mode all the time but I can’t stand icons, I like to see everything in detail mode. So I switched to detail mode and tried to save it as the “File Management” profile. Ever since doing that Konqueror won’t launch in superuser mode (it has an error). Dolphin will launch just fine (but I don’t know how to run it as superuser).
In KDE3.5 settings for the root Konqueror are stored here: /root/.kde/share/config
Maybe it helps to delete konqiconviewrc or konquerorrc. They will be recreated with the default settings on the next start of Konqueror.
I should have mentioned that the system is KDE 4.
I tried removing everything from the config directory you pointed me to but Konqueror still crashes when I try to launch it in superuser mode.
Hmm, I am as puzzled or even more puzzled as you are. I would have suggested kdesu dolphin, but that always fails on my machine. My final solution, whenever I had big problems with KDE was to log out of KDE and get into text mode. There I moved the whole .kde directory somewhere else to have a backup. On the next start a new .kde directory with default settings was created for my user account. That used to work for me, maybe it does for root.
Besides, it’s not a good idea to run konq as root all the time I guess.
supertimorplusfort - I really try to never log in as root, doing that brings Linux more or less down to the security of Windows. It’s tempting though because it certainly becomes annoying to constantly be root authenticating. For now on that machine I have been doing a “work around” by just logging in as root. Rename the entire .kde directory eh? Interesting idea.
hcw - thank you for pointing me to that, it’s good refresher. I should try using kdesu.
As a general comment on doing work as root: my usage of Linux (for the past ten years) has been as a server, 99% of the time it purrs along without trouble in the corner of my office, the other 1% of the time when I actually work on it is because I need to reconfigure something and that requires root permissions 99% of the time. Thus an extremely high percentage of my time working with Linux really is as root (even if I don’t log in as root).
openSUSE 11 has impressed me though as a desirable day to day work environment (I like KDE 4) and I’m tempted to try Linux as my main OS and leave Windows for only doing work with software that is only available for Windows. Now if only Linux supported NTFS so I could have a nice dual boot machine! One caveat is that openSUSE 11, while being very user friendly, also seems to be quite unstable (contrary to all my prior experience with Linux).