Hi–using opensuse 11.4 on an hp laptop. As of yesterday when I start opensuse…it does the first screen with the chameleon tyoe logo, then it goes to my desktop wheer it kind of fades to black…a skype logon window is open…and then the wallet thing asks for my password I think for the wireless to start up which it does, and then I get an error from HPLIP where it syas no system tray detected on this system whic I would agree with because everything is missing!!!
What do I do to recover the system back? This is my wfe’s computer so I don’t know what happened to cause this…In windows I’d do a system restore to an earlier checkpoint…is there something similar in suse?
please help–i’m a linux noob. thanks.
After letting the laptop be idle with teh black screen my screensaver does start up correctly which is a random slide show of all my pictures on the hard drive…so thiings are working—just no functional desktop of system tray…
After searching trying to fins similar symptoms I came across this thread:
System Tray Not Found, can’t start KDE
So it seems that the KDE Plasma Workspace refuses to start-- The error message when starting KDE is “No System Tray detected on this system”.
I do not know how to do the things that are mentioned in the above thread—any help in troubleshooting this would be greatly appreciated—the thing is I did not do any updating of any software when this all started but then again I don;t know if my wife did something that i’m not aware of…
Looks like something went wrong in the KDE config files.
Try adding another user and logging in as the new user.
To do this
- boot to a terminal by pressing 3 at the boot screen then hit return
- log in as your root
- turn yast in terminal mode by typing yast
- add the new test user
- reboot by typing reboot
log in as the new user if all is well then renaming the .kde4 directory in you origianl home should fix the problem but you will have to reset your desktop preferences.
yes–that worked–second user had a fine desktop.
How do I rename the .kde4 directory in the original user home? where is the directory? does renaming it just force suse to recreate a new .kde4?
The director is in you home directory
again boot into terminal as above
log in as your old user name/password
type
mv ~/.kde4 ~/.kde4.old
reboot log into GUI as you old self now the desktop will be reset to default so you will have to reset your preferences.
Note it may be possible that some KDE apps may store data in .kde4 so keep the old around for a while to be sure you don’t need anything once that is certain you can remove .kde4.old
Note the a period in the front of the name indicated it is hidden so in the GUI browser you need to set show hidden to see any such file or directory if you want to see it in the GUI
Note the ~ is a shorthand for the current users home directory.
That worked perfectly–thank you very much. Is there a way to troubleshoot what went wrong in that .kde4 directory so I can learn what went wrong (and also restore all my settings)?
Your welcome, glad to help.
I suppose there may be a way but these things happen from time to time. Unless you have a great amount of time and knowledge I’d chock it up to an act of god. Things that might cause it are odd bug in the code, power outage or power shut off without proper shutdown, failing drive, logging into the GUI as root, cosmic rays, act of god etc. If it is reproducible it is a bug and should be reported. But modern software is so complex it may be a a bug that only shows up in a very specific configuration and you may never set things to that exact configuration again. If you want to chase the problem you might want to join the KDE mailing list (google for it) and see if some one wants to look at your files. But that is a long shot.