On Wed, Oct 18, 2006 at 09:37:37PM +0100, peter wrote:
After numerous disasters with Mandriva 2007 too many and too tedious to mention - just, avoid this if you have any alternative at all - I gave up and installed Etch.
You will all smile quietly and ask what took him so long.
Etch went in perfectly and with a minumum of fuss and started up Gnome. OK, I thought I will get kde and so on as well, for the sake of variety. So I now started up synaptic and installed fluxbox, fvwm and tried to install kde.
However, the other WMs don't work as expected.
fluxbox appears to start up with nothing at all. Right clicking does nothing, left clicking only brings up a fluxbox choice. There seems to be no way to start any application, including a configuration application or editor or terminal.
Then with kde there is something if possible more baffling. Synaptic declines to get kde on the grounds that it is missing kwebdev. It cannot find kwebdev if you search for it using synaptic. I googled kwebdev and it seems to be part of quanta. So I tried to install quanta, and did not seem to get quanta, but got a couple of libraries, but in any case, still no luck with kde.
Windowmaker works fine however.
Am I doing, or failing to do, something silly or obvious?
Yes, you're not using Slackware! :-)
My experience of most other distributions is that they all play around too much with the standard way of starting X (and thus different WMs) such that it's very difficult to sort things out if you want something that's not the norm.
Most/many distributions adjust the startx/xinitrc scripts for their own ends and this often makes it difficult to get 'non standard' WMs to start up correctly.
If you're using xdm/kdm/wdm to start X then the same applies to an extent, the very *existence* of kdm and wdm (which replace the perfectly serviceable xdm for KDE and Gnome respectively) just points at the problems of each WM environment doing its own thing.
All this probably doesn't address your problems though, especially the KDE one. I think you may find the fluxbox problem may be what I'm wibbling on about - non-standard start-up scripts.
Personally I've worked my way 'back' from KDE/Gnome, through XFCE and have ended up using only FVWM2, all the others just seem to get in the way to be quite honest.