KDE messed up on update from Hardy to Jaunty

[Terrell Prude' Jr.]

Lisi Reisz wrote:
> On Monday 08 June 2009 14:59:34 Terrell Prude' Jr. wrote:
>   
>> Lisi Reisz wrote:
>>     
>>> Someone whose computer I administer has updated directly from Hardy to
>>> Jaunty. He now cannot log-on to KDE.  The process starts and then hangs. 
>>> Presumably this is to do with the change from 3.5.x to 4.x.x.
>>>
>>> I would prefer solve this without reinstalling as he has no back-up.
>>>
>>> All suggestions welcomed!
>>>       
>> By "the process", do you mean that the login screen doesn't show up, or
>> that he gets the desktop but then it quits, or that he can enter in his
>> userID/passwd and then he immediately gets kicked out--what, more
>> precisely, are we talking about here?
>>     
>
> The GUI login screen opens, but when the correct password is entered the 
> system hangs.  From the CLI, after a successful login, I type startx, enter, 
> and KDE starts to open, but then the system hangs.
>
> It is definitely KDE, because I have installed xfce4, and there are no 
> apparent problems.
>
> There are now problems with sound, so I may reinstall after all, as Ubuntu, to 
> get pulse-audio instead.  But I shall try to purge phonon and install 
> pulse-audio before I do anything that drastic.
>   

My "upgrade" from Hardy to Intrepid eventually became a reinstall, and 
personally, I'd recommend as such due to the KDE major revision issue 
here.  The reinstall was easy for me to do because I always put /home on 
a separate partition.  The way I partition a disk for a desktop box is 
(usually) as follows.

/boot = 200MB
/ = 10GB to 20GB, just in case
/home = the rest of the disk

Makes reinstalls very easy and wipes all that stuff in /var clean every 
time.  In some cases, I'll make a separate /var and /tmp as well, but 
the above is really all you need.

--TP