CentOS - Aug 2005 - Welcome screen is crashing.

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


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If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an  
improbable fiction. - Fabian, Twelfth Night, III,v