OK, so I'm a noob to Debian, but not to Linux or
Xfree86 or kdm screwing up. Before this week I was
running RedHat, but I wanted to be able to switch to
KDE 3.1 and Xfree 4.3 and I figured that switching
distributions to Debian would be my best bet.
Installed the latest pakages in sid, including kde 3.1
with the kdm package and Xfree86 4.2.1. Everything
went well with just a little manual configuration for
gpm, grub, and a few other packages up until I tried
to start an X server. It was a strange psychadelic
look when X actually came up (this was after a lot of
playing with the XF86Config-4 file). It showed a
color negative of the boot screen for my Thinkpad T22.
Apparently this screen is stored in the video BIOS on
my Savage/MX-IV (And yes, I read all the problems with
Savage/MX-IV cards in Thinkpads; none of it answered
the question.) The X font server was working and
could draw text to the screen and libpng was working
and could draw pngs to the screen. Gtk, qt, libjpeg,
xwrapper -- none of them were working Everything acted
like nothing was wrong. Its just that the only output
that I saw was text and pngs. (Believe me, kde looked
far out; you should see what kde looks like without
any qt widgets being able to be rendered.)
Importantly, though, kdm worked; it just looked a
little weird.
My real question arose later when I chose to
abandon
that particular problem and install Xfree86 4.3 from
the Linux-glibc-2.3 binaries on ftp.xfree86.org. It
fixed all of my problems, but created just one new one
when the kdm command is executed it acts like it is
working perfectly fine -- no error output, not even an
error return code -- but it just plain doesn't start.
No X server starts nothing. Same deal when run from
an xterm -- no output, no nothing -- nothing happens.
Even stranger, xdm and gdm work like nothing ever
happened; its just kdm that has a problem and not
anything else in kde either.
Now, I know that Xfree86 4.3 is not supported
by
debian and there's a reason why sid comes with 4.2 not
4.3, so don't write back saying that I should have
stuck with the 4.2 package. Its just I think that
debian must put something special in one of the config
files for Xfree that makes it run right with kdm, and
since I stupidly overwrote all the Xfree86
configuration files when I installed the new version.
I'm just wondering if anyone knows what happened
and/or how I can fix it.
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