Hmm... it was tough to get into CentOS this morning. I booted up, and after the screen flickered a bit, I got an error message that said some png file couldn't be found (Sorry I was in a bit of a panic and didn't think to copy down the whole error message verbatum). I think it was "throbbing.png", which is a little salacious sounding, but that's what it was.
Anyway, it says this image can't be found, and there's nothing else on the screen but the error message and a button to click "OK". So I click it, and nothing happens. Ever. No matter how many times I say Okay, it just sits there. So I tried restarting X, using my newly learned ctrl-alt-backspace key sequence. When X comes back, same message. Because I can't think of anything else to do, I try ctrl-alt-backspace a bunch of times in a row, and then after a few times, the error message changes. It says "X seems to be crashing. I will try to restart with a different greeting screen". Fine by me, so I click "OK", and I get this really plain, light blue and grey login screen. I login with my usual personal account, and I'm in.
I don't want to go through *that* again. But I'm not sure what the issue is. I was doing two things last night. One is install OpenOffice Beta, which, after help from this list, finally worked. I was also wanting to install new themes for KDE, but that didn't get far as I downloaded one theme, and I couldn't get past the ./configure part because I didn't specify the right perameters or something. But in the process of trying to figure out why the ./configure failed, I attempted to update KDE following instructions on their web site. Part of the exercise was to get qt installed, as the theme seemed to require it. But all I did was add a repository from the KDE site and do a um install of some KDE related programs.
There is one other thing that I notice about my system that's different. In the top left hand of my screen, on my panel, the CentOS logo is gone, and in it's place is the icon for a "Prominent North American Linux Distributor". Where'd *that* come from?
Dave