KDE refuses to start, part 2

[ken at kg293.net (Ken Gosier)]

Just to follow up on this, and to send along thanks to Jerry, Christoph,
and friend (sorry I didn't get your name!) for helping solve this problem.

So: Christoph brought down KDE by Ctrl-Alt-F1, logging in as root, and
doing init 3. Then by logging in as ken, and typing startkde, the error
message came up:

/usr/bin/startkde: Cannot write to KDE.startkde.fq12o9u
You don't have write permissions for /tmp

(Not exactly, but something very similar.) Which was very strange, b/c I
own the KDE startup file, and b/c /tmp had full permissions for everyone.
Also he was able to find by adding a new user, then that user was able to
start kde fine.

So in the end, the decision was that some file in my home dir was causing
the problem. I had made some changes to my .bashrc lately. (I hadn't
mentioned this b/c the changes I made were pretty simple. duh. :-( ) But
after renaming to .bashrc.old, voila, kde starts again! So after
investigating the .bashrc file, it turns out the offending line was
(drumroll please...)

set -o noclobber

I'm a little worried that this now confirms my status as a Redhat luser.
:-/ But seriously, this seems strange to me that a simple thing like this
will cause kde so many problems. Am I just complaining, or should kde be
able to deal more gracefully with something like this?



Ken Gosier said:
> Just to follow up: I do get a .xsession-errors file, with zero size. For
> logs, I've looked in /var/log/messages, but must confess I don't know
> what other logs I should check. :-(
>
> btw, the meeting announcement says 6:30pm for general Q&A. Would it be
> cool if I brought this laptop to show people?
>
>
>
> Derek Martin said:
>> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>> Hash: SHA1
>>
>> On Tue, Feb 18, 2003 at 09:23:47PM -0500, Ken Gosier wrote:
>>> As an addendum, I found a bit about this on kde's web site:
>>>
>>> http://www.kde.org/info/faq.html
>>
>> I can't say this isn't your problem, but especially since the update
>> didn't fix it, I doubt it.  There could be dozens of reasons why
>> you're having your problem.
>>
>> Look in your logs for anything suspicious.  Look in ~/.xsession-errors
>> if that file exists, for anything out of place.  Chances are, this is
>> caused by some permissions problem, a full filesystem, a stale lock
>> file, or any number of other things.
>>
>> This is one reason (of many) why I prefer X apps (i.e. older, Xt/Xaw
>> ones) to newer gnome and KDE apps.  They tend to produce much better
>> and useful error messages when something goes wrong, providing you the
>> possibility of actually fixing the problem.  But DTEs are all about
>> being sexy, and error messages aren't sexy.
>>
>> Faster.  More flexible.  More configurable.  20 years old.
>> No one can beat xterm.  No one.
>>
>> THAT's sexy.
>>
>> - --
>> Derek D. Martin
>> http://www.pizzashack.org/
>> GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
>>
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>
> --
> Ken Gosier
> ken at kg293.net
> ken_gosier at yahoo.com
>
>
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-- 
Ken Gosier
ken at kg293.net
ken_gosier at yahoo.com