Argh, help!

Ok, I installed transgaming's winex software with the rpms, and now when I log in as root from the main login screen, linux is totally unusable. I get a few boxes with warning looking icons that pop up, but no text of any kind. The startup menu is gone. I can't do anything at all.

I can log in fine as myself.

Anyone have a clue what could cause this, or how to fix it?

Let me preface this by saying that what I'm offering is not a solution to your problem, but rather a bit of advice.

Logging into X as root (or even logging into root at all) is generally not a good idea, and is completely avoidable. If you are going to do some work in the console that needs root priviledges, use the su program, which gives you root priviledges for one console session (check man su(1) for more information). There are also graphical versions of su. One probably comes with your desktop environment; for example, KDE has kdesu, which works much like su. Using these programs, you'll be able to completely avoid every having to log in as root, which, IMO, is not only a convenience, but a good security practice as well.

I hope that was a little bit helpful. Sorry I can't fix your problem

I don't see any advantage to what you talk about, but it's a bit on the annoying side because every other terminal you pull up is not logged in as root. I would rather have everything just come up as root when I'm doing system work. I use su sometimes too, depending on how much work I'm doing.

Anyone have any clue what I can do to fix that? Would reinstalling KDE likely fix it?

MRD said:

I don't see any advantage to what you talk about, but it's a bit on the annoying side because every other terminal you pull up is not logged in as root. I would rather have everything just come up as root when I'm doing system work. I use su sometimes too, depending on how much work I'm doing.

Anyone have any clue what I can do to fix that? Would reinstalling KDE likely fix it?

Click to expand...

There is a great advantage to not logging in as root, you or a malicious program won't be able to screw up your system since it only has rights to your home directory.

As for your problem you'd have to list the error messages, otherwise we have absolutely nothing to go on.

-DarkArctic

Are you using a graphical login or login from a command line and then running startx to get to kde? Also what distribution are you using?

I'm using Red Hat Professional Workstation. I am using a graphical login which starts up into KDE. I can't give an error message because there isn't one. The normal login screen is fine, and I can start up as myself in KDE without any issues. When I login as root, it does not start up normally. I have a few boxes with warning signs (exclamation points) in various boxes, but NO TEXT at all whatsoever. The colors are screwed up too, the background is black instead of the normal blue. It's not unresponsive, I have a mouse pointer, but I can't start everything as all the menus seem empty and the bar on the bottom is gone. Again, no text under any circumstances.

This may get you up and running again but you'll want to backup anything important in your /root directory. I believe you can copy the contents of /etc/skel and overwrite the current files in you /root directory with those files and that should erase you current KDE settings (along with any other root user specific settings.) When you start kde as root after that it'll be like the first time you ran it. Some one please correct me if this is wrong and is going to mess up anything. But it sounds like you don't have an awful lot to loose right now.

The command would look like this I believe and you'll have to su to become the root user to change anything in /root

cp -R /etc/skel/ /root/

second edit: after thinking about it for a second you could actually copy the files from /home/username/ to /root/ and that would make the root account basically the same as the user you're currently using if you like the way it's setup. Command would be this

cp -R /home/workingusername/ /root/

Do I want to copy all the files, or are there some I could copy so as just to get the KDE setup without changing everything?

I assume it's basically the .* files you are talking about that give the config.

MRD said:

Do I want to copy all the files, or are there some I could copy so as just to get the KDE setup without changing everything?

I assume it's basically the .* files you are talking about that give the config.

Click to expand...

Correct, you could copy just . directory for KDE but I don't have a box here with kde on it to verify the directory name, just fluxbox on the server. you could give that a try if you can figure out what directory the kde files are in.

Interesting, copying from skel didn't seem to do anything, but copying from my own home seemed to work. So far, it doesn't seem to have screwed anything up...

Thanks for the advice.

No problem and glad to help Now that you mention the /etc/skel/ not working it makes sense because there are NO settings for kde in there so you would not have overwritten anything. copying from the /home worked because there was something there. I should think out my answers more thoroughly in the future!!