Messed up X settings settings for root following Nvidia driver installation

English Hardware
1

Hi there

I have a new take on this problem. I hope you can help.

My old Linux machine has a Geforce 6200 card and was working fine with the nouvea driver but lacked decent performance and options to optimise the card. So I decided to upgrade to the Nvidia driver and connect from the card’s DVI output to the HDMI port on my TV (rather than the VGA port as this would give me access to the higher resolutions available in HDMI mode). The driver download, installation and set up went like a dream except the font sizes were all enormous (even though it said I was still using 8pt) as was the frame size of the windows. After much button bashing I managed to get the font size and window borders looking back to normal, unfortunately I’m still not sure what I did.

I then logged in as root (I was previously using my own account) and noticed the same problem with this ID. This time after much mindless adjustment of settings I find that when I switch to the root account and the window manager starts the signal is lost to the monitor (TV). I suspect I have inadvertently made a change to the graphics settings that is running the monitor in an unsupported mode. Luckily my usual user ID is unaffected but I would like to fix the problem I have created for the root account. I’m trying to find the file where the X settings are stored so I can manually adjust them to something ‘safe’, however I can’t find it! Can anyone help?

Thanks
Ian

2

In any case you got it working but never ever log into a GUI as root you will break stuff totally by accident. I have not logged into a GUI as root for at least 8 years and have not missed it.

The Desktop setting are user specific and stored in the desktops configuration files in the users home

You can set thing global but Desktops will overrule any. NVIDIA supplies a program nvidia-settings Should be in your menu to make global settings. But this may modify the Xorg.conf files which are owned by root so you must run the program as root from a console

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Thanks for the reply. Yes, normally I wouldn’t log in as root to the GUI but on this occasion I was trying to sort out an existing problem and made it worse :’(

Strangely ICEWM still works (albeit with massive font size). Its KDE for root that appears to be screwed up. I’ve looked in all the config files (including the hidden ones) in the /root directory but can’t find anything that looks like it might contain the offending video settings… :frowning:

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Remove all /root/.kde4 that is where all roots KDE settings are

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Yep, that did the trick. I wanted to edit them so I didn’t lose any set up I was happy with but in the end I though f*** it and nuked the lot. Thanks for the help.