On Friday 30 January 2009 18:01:33 Kishore wrote: > On Friday 30 Jan 2009 10:53:58 pm Anne Wilson wrote: > > On Friday 30 January 2009 14:49:32 Anne Wilson wrote: > > > After all the problems yesterday on my CentOS box I think I have got > > > most of .kde back. However, an attempt to login as anne still brings > > > up the "Unable to start kstartconfig. Check your installation". > > > > > > kstartconfig is there in /usr/bin, and $PATH has /usr/bin. I'm stuck > > > now. Everything google can find talks about "Chown -R myname:myname > > > /home/myname" but ownership is not the problem. Files are correctly > > > owned by both name and UID. Just to make sure, I did chown - but I'm > > > 100% positive that this is not the problem. Can anyone else tell me of > > > another reason? > > > > That was a total red herring. I don't believe that it concerned > > kstartconfig - but it was missing some config file from ~/.kde. I had > > copied back a best-guess set of files from ~/.kde, without, it appeared, > > making any difference to this. However, I suddenly realised that I had > > not rebooted since I did that - just changed logins. A reboot brought my > > desktop up perfectly. > > Surprising. I'd expect kde to recreate any missing file. I still kind of > suspect a corruption of some kind in perhaps the /tmp folder or something > like that which got corrected in the startup? I'll never be absolutely certain what went wrong, but today I installed a better quality psu, and while doing so discovered that one of the sata leads had a cracked connection which was making it insecure. I now think that that was the cause of the whole mess. After the big crash the whole inode table (or whatever it's called) was lost - it couldn't even cd to /var. Meanwhile fsck had reduced my ~/.kde to a *very* short text file. Corruption doesn't come much worse than that without actually losing much data. In the event all I lost was my addressbook and diary - which would have been catastrophic except that I do back them up to elsewhere every day - a habit I started when kabc used to come up empty quite regularly :-) Only one appointment was missing when I restored them from my backup. Kde isn't to blame for any of what happened, but it challenged my understanding for quite a while :-) Anne
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