At last! KDE 3.5.4 bundle fully installed and no apparent faults . . . but why did I have problems in the first place???

Weellllll, after a lot of hard work which finally kept me awake into the wee, wee hours of a typhoon-soaked Monday morning (the Sunday evening was hardly any better), I am pleased to have finally sorted out KDE 3.5.4 and the thing is working without any visible errors . . . fingers crossed . . .

The problems I found were trivial but until you work them through, do some searches to find solutions and look in places where you would perhaps not normally have looked, things seem to be stuck. A locked URPMI database was solved easily by the simple expedient of Easy URPMI (again), but the cure for the strange inability to log in as root (the same trouble as I had under KDE 3.5.2) was to be found in the file /etc/kde/kdm/kdmrc. The setting:

AllowRootLogin=false

had to be reset to:

AllowRootLogin=true

and after that there was no problem. This information in fact came from one of the fora on the Linspire web site dealing with KDE - which just goes to show how one can find answers to the same problem on different distros. No doubt there are those who would consider the time spent researching such a trivial point as being wasted. Perhaps these are the people who never really learn anything and never find solutions to their problems?

There was one curious thing which puzzled me, however, which was a small message box which came up before logging in: "Cannot find file /usr/share/mdk/dm" or some such, which was simply cured by installing the appropriate KDM theme.

More exciting, perhaps, was getting MPlayer to view a number of video files which had previously been unplayable, presumably because they are encoded in a version of Real Video later than compatible with RP8, one of my preferred apps for listening to the BBC's streaming audio channels. This involved searching for files of "certain" codecs and installing them, after which, hey presto! - nil desperandum! I was awake into even later hours of the morning watching a split version of a well-known Rod Serling UFO film. And very interesting it was, too! The loss of KMplayer as a result of the latest KDE installations was saddening because it worked excellently, but there remains one baffling characteristic common to all of the innumerable unsuccessful installation attempts recently, which is a curious inability of the system to recognise some freshly-installed rpms.

Despite the problems, I always think back to how often I had to reload Windoze 3.x on my old PCs and suddenly it doesn't seem so bad . . . in the other partition, the reinstalled XP Pro seems to be going from bad to worse as an unknown recent update (before the ones this weekend which M$ were forced to apply in order to comply with a recent fair trading ruling here in Korea) the system had somehow become destabilised and I actually had to download some (rather slow) configuration interface software from ATI and even now there are still problems. Problems, problems, problems . . . thy name is Micro$oft. Truth to tell, Mandriva remains wonderfully stable (a kernel panic is an extremely rare event, for example); the real fault was in KDE itself for retaining "default" settings, which I then had to go chasing to get what what I wanted. And now I have what I wanted, and I'm not complaining; I'm looking forward to downloading Mandriva 2007.0 and the eventual arrival of KDE 4.0.