Can't start DVD iso installation...

[D. Michael McIntyre]

On Tuesday 07 November 2006 4:31 am, Johnny Ernst Nielsen wrote:

> Thank you Mr. McIntyre.

You're welcome Mr. Nielsen.

> I have now tried Ctrl+Alt+F1 during the useless X cycle.
> For some odd reason simply going to a console like this stops the X
> cycling and makes the boot continue to the live desktop.

That was cheap.  Cheap is good!

> KDM takes my user name and password, and then it just returns me to
> KDM again.

Hrm.  I've seen various flavors of this problem over the years.

Um.  I think I figured it out the last time looking at my ~/.xsession-errors 
to get the clue I needed to zero in on what needed to be done.

> I have tried Ctrl+Alt+F1, stopping KDM, reconfiguring xserver with the
> correct video drivers, screen resolutions, etc., starting KDM.

What's I'd try first is log into the virtual console, stop KDM, and then try

startx

See if that works.  If not, try

xinit

If X init comes up to a screen with a hideous moiré pattern and an xterm 
window, then mouse over to the xterm (if your mouse is working) and try

startkde

from there.  If that works, you can start KDE with

xinit /usr/bin/startkde

If that doesn't work, you can bring KDE up piece by piece too.  From the 
xterm, you can

kwin &

Which gets you a window manager, then

kdesktop &
kicker &

which should give you a more comfortable and graphical place from which to 
poke around and try to discover the trouble.

Hopefully you don't have a situation so broken as to require anything that 
raw.  I think it's neat to do this just to emphasize how all the little 
pieces of KDE function independently of each other though.  X with no window 
manager sucks, but I've used straight X with kwin for hours trying to surf 
the web and figure out WTF was going wrong with my setup.  (Because trying to 
surf the web with lynx or links from a text console is horrible.)

Anyway...  Try ~/.xsession-errors first.

-- 
D. Michael McIntyre 

Author of Rosegarden Companion http://rosegarden.sourceforge.net/tutorial/
See my new music stand unfolding at http://users.adelphia.net/~silvan/