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
On Aug 4, 2005, at 9:45 PM, Dave Gutteridge wrote:
the ./configure failed, I attempted to update KDE following instructions on their web site.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ this part worries me a bit.
as a general rule, the more you diverge from the standard distribution, the more likely you are to encounter instability or unexpected behavior. KDE is very big, and has lots of dependencies, and thus lots of potential to break things.
did you upgrade by installing new RPMs, or by building from source? whichever way you chose, it may be difficult to get back to a stable configuration if you overwrote the installation of KDE that was already there.
-steve
--- If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction. - Fabian, Twelfth Night, III,v
did you upgrade by installing new RPMs, or by building from source? whichever way you chose, it may be difficult to get back to a stable configuration if you overwrote the installation of KDE that was already there.
I don't think I overwrote anything, I think I just added to the KDE that I have. At least that was my intention. I was trying to avoid getting any betas or anything too new or weird. My understanding was that I just needed to get a couple of additional packages in order to have the ability to install different KDE themes.
What I did was this:
I put the following repository in /etc/yum.repos.d/: http://apt.kde-redhat.org/apt/kde-redhat/redhat/kde-redhat.repo
Then I did the following commands: |[root@localhost dave]# rpm --import http://kde-redhat.sourceforge.net/gpg-pubkey-ff6382fa-3e1ab2ca%7C |[root@localhost dave]# yum install kde qt arts kdelibs kdebase gtk+ gtk2 redhat-artwork ||[root@localhost dave]# || yum update
I got these instructions from: http://kde-redhat.sourceforge.net/
Could any of this been the cause of the problem?
Dave |
On Fri, 2005-08-05 at 14:19 +0900, Dave Gutteridge wrote:
I don't think I overwrote anything, I think I just added to the KDE that I have. At least that was my intention. I was trying to avoid getting any betas or anything too new or weird. My understanding was that I just needed to get a couple of additional packages in order to have the ability to install different KDE themes. What I did was this: I put the following repository in /etc/yum.repos.d/: http://apt.kde-redhat.org/apt/kde-redhat/redhat/kde-redhat.repo
At the risk of seeming like I'm telling you to go back to where you started, if you find yourself wanting the full set of latest'n greatest software, I don't know if CentOS is most ideal.
I can't remember, but what was the main logic of your move to CentOS? IIRC, it was someone on this list and the Fedora list. I'm not question it, just trying to get a feel for what you were expecting.
At the risk of seeming like I'm telling you to go back to where you started, if you find yourself wanting the full set of latest'n greatest software, I don't know if CentOS is most ideal.
I didn't think I did want the latest'n greatest. Following the instructions to configure KDE was not an attempt to get some new super-cool feature. I just wanted some themes. Not particularly fancy themes, I just wanted to change the look of my desktop. I didn't think that would be a particularly shock inducing task. If I did end up upgrading or advancing beyond what CentOS was designed for, it was only through faithfully following the instructions to get themes working. The only cutting edge software I was looking for was the OpenOffice beta, and that's only because I already have .ods files created with the Beta version from when I was running it in Windows. Other than that, I don't aspire for anything bleeding edge, just more or less the same hardware and application functionality I used to get in Windows. And I'm more or less there. The only things on the task-list are Palm Pilot connectivity and Japanese input, which I'm led to believe are possible in CentOS.
I can't remember, but what was the main logic of your move to CentOS?
Logic? What is this "logic" of which you speak? I don't know the meaning of the word. One morning I woke up and a synapse fired in my brain that said "You must make your computer as open-source as possible NOW! Obey me minion, for I am your brain and I seek to destroy the convenience of your workflow for arbitrary and inexplicable reasons!".
Dave
Update:
I did another YUM install, and I don't know if that's what made a difference, but I rebooted, and this time i didn't get any error messages of any kind. However, the login screen is this really plain format. It's kind of nice, in a way. It looks more like the Fedora log in, with that flat navy colour.
The one thing that is a bit squiky about it, and this is a super small detail, but now it has two fields for "username" and "password". Before, it had one field, where you entered the username, and once you pressed "enter", it would switch into a password field. This seems more sensible as you are always going to enter them in one at a time anyway, and this way there's no tabbing between fields.
But now I have this two field set up. It's working, which is good. But is the log in screen something I can configure?
Dave
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Bryan J. Smith -
Dave Gutteridge -
Steve Huff