Hello,

Could not find a better forum into which to post...

System is FreeBSD 8.0 KDE4

I built the FreeBSD system with KDE ran it and everything was fine. Then I installed a variety of ports, mostly successful (e.g. Thunderbird, Firefox (Konqueror would crash a lot)). The next time I started KDE I got a bubble screen, then a rectangle with a disk drive, tools, [forgotten icon], KDE icon in a small rectangle, and then just the bubbles screen, nothing else.

The only thing I can do is Alt-F2 which allows me to run applications like Thunderbird, Firefox, terminal, etc., and Ctrl-Alt-Del which allows me to logout. Can not find error messages anywhere. Was even able to install GIMP in this situation.

Any ideas as to what I've done wrong?

TIA
Bernard Higonnet

Have you installed KWin and Plasma ( which are part of the KDE Workspace )

bcooksley wrote:Have you installed KWin and Plasma ( which are part of the KDE Workspace )

I suppose so (sic!). KDE was working completely. As I say, I installed various things and now it doesn't work completely. I do have a plasma-desktop.core file... (I can see how to install plasma widgets, but not re/install plasma)

Among the particularities afflicting me are:

1) If I try to launch a terminal window after alt-F2 it works roughly half the time (when it fails, terminal window appears and then disappears)
2) If I copy something (a link) and then try to use alt-tab to go to Firefox, both Firefox and Thunderbird go beserk, as if I were holding down the tab key.

I'd be perfectly happy to do a complete re-install of KDE except don-t know how. sysintall doesn't do that kind of thing, ports do nothing, and recompiling from code requires 22 downloads the way I see it, so I;m discouraged...

I am going to ask for help on this at kde-freebsd@kde.org

Thanks
Bernard Higonnet