I'm afraid I'm at the end of the line in that respect. Driver version 173.14.12 is the last one supporting my card, and since it is on AGP bus updating it is both expensive and will only get me one generation up.

The furthest I've gotten on this is logging in to failsafe Gnome terminal and running kwin and plasma from within the terminal, working fine and desktop effects on. Is there anything more I can try to run manually from terminal?

I've also connected via ssh -X from a Gnome terminal on another machine and from within that running startkde successfully, placing my kde desktop on top of gnome. So this can hardly be a case of broken installation.

But since I've already used way too much time on searching for answers to this, I guess I'll just have to learn to live with gnome. Who knows, maybe I'll come to like it.

Suggestions still welcome, and thanks for existing ones.

Eggert

I think you should post in a *ubuntu forum in that this may be distro related
did you try google? http://www.google.com/search?client=ope ... 8&oe=utf-8

since original post was 2/22 have you tried updating 4.2? tommorrow 4.2.1 whould be available.

OK, so I decided to see if this was distro specific.

Downloaded kde-four-live cd and booted it up. Same thing, about halfway into the progressbar it hangs totally. This is based on openSuSE so, not only connected to kubuntu.

However, just for the hell of it, didn't get my hopes up, I tried booting into kde-four-live in failsafe mode, and what do you know. IT WORKS

So copying the kernel boot parameters from kde-four-live failsafe over to my kubuntu setup, it boots and works ok too, at least on this first try.

the parameters used are: ide=nodma apm=off acpi=off noresume selinux=0 nosmp noapic maxcpus=0 edd=off

Now I just have to find out which of these are helping my system working.

My (totally unsupported) guess is that problem has something to do with my old agp bus nvidia geforce 5600.

But I'm a happy user of kde 4.2 at the moment. Oh the relief, I tried very hard to like gnome this last week. It was not happening.

Eggert

Just to finish this off with final solution

Out of the number of kernel parameters I got off of openSuSE failsafe only one was needed, acpi=off

So that is my final fix, add acpi=off to grub menu.lst entry

Thanks to all who offered advice,
Eggert