KDE not loading...

[Replicon]

Hey,

I was installing Debian (sarge, stable) on my roommate's Compaq Presario 1900 laptop, and we're having trouble getting it to load X properly with the mouse. We've tried this with both the touchpad and a PS/2 mouse, and have tried tons of things in XF86Config-4...

What happens is, when you get the right mouse configuration, it starts loading kde after you login, and when it gets to the keyboard/mouse icon, it crashes, and kdm respawns... Well, looking at the logs from XServer, this is the error we got:

XINPUT: Adding external input device ("Configured Mouse"). (MOUSE)

...and then it just goes "Fatal Error, signal 4 received"... What gives?

And the reason I find this to be most strange is that WHILE the kde loader progress is showing, WE CAN MOVE THE MOUSE!! So the drivers load fine, just something can't be run properly in kde. Does anyone know what could be causing this? Thanks!

 

[n0cmonkey]

There are no messages leading up to the error? No hints at all?

 

[Replicon]

Well, no noticable error messages. You see the usual messages about how it's adding the mouse as a core pointer and everything... but no line that starts with (EE) or (WW)... it all seems to be general progress flow...

 

[pitupepito2000]

what you probably want do do is firt boot the laptop, and then shutdonw the xserver login as root and type "/etc/init.d/kdm stop" and then login as a normal user and in a terminal alt+f1-6 type "xinit" that should bring up the xserver without a window manager and then type "startkde" or "kdestart" don't remember which one at the moment. and then try to see what error messages it gives you in the login shell, that message is usually more useful. Also if the mouse works when after you typed "xinit" then that means that your mouse x servere config is fine, but that it is a problem with the configuration of kde.

hope that helps,
pitupepito

 

[Replicon]

Ok, it looks like it's giving me the same error message, with an added line at the bottom:

xterm: Fatal IO error 32 (Broken pipe) or KillClient on X server ":0.0"

 

[Replicon]

Oh yeah, and the mouse worked fine within the x server (i was able to start some applications too and everything)... but when I ran startkde, it barfed in the same manner... Is there just some config file, other than the XF86config-4 one that I can play with, by any chance?

EDIT: blah, other WMs work fine. I'll just stick to fluxbox and ion, which are far smaller/faster anyway . Thanks for all the help.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Wierd. I wonder what KDE does to the mouse...

 

[pitupepito2000]

well, it seems that kde is the one that is causing trouble. I would suggest that you try to look and see if you have anything useful in ~/.xsession-errors, and also in /var/log/kdm.log. Also you may want to burn a copy of knoppix and run it in the laptop, to see how the kde of knoppix handles the mouse. Another thing to try is to type "kde"<tab><tab> and see if there are any config options that may be helpful. If everything else fails look in google.com or in vivisimo the new search engine, and see if different people who owned that laptop had any problems with it or related to the mouse.

I hope it helps,
pitupepito

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Signal 4 is SIGILL (Illegal instruction). Sounds like KDE was doing something funky that made the X server crash. I bet if you installed a different version, or even just a different package of xfree, it would solve the problem. I use the xfree 4.3 packages from:

deb http://debian.fabbione.net/debian-ipv6 sid ipv6

And sarge is testing; woody is stable. Which are you using? You definitely don't want to be using woody on a desktop.