After waiting for some time to upgrade my old sidux install to KDE4.2, I bit the bullet and did a massive smxi du. Now I have no display manager. The login screen comes up fine but it comes right back when I try to log in. In the console, as root, if I do init 5 after having been in runlevel 3, I get an xserver error. I tried removing and installing xserver-xorg...no help. How to restore?
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Have you checked how much space is left in your partition? If it is nearly full, KDE will not start.
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Have you (re)installed your graphics drivers?
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Yes if I remember correctly I had to reinstall my drivers after my switch over too. Let us know.
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Those are the two main causes, however, you won't see any gui/graphic thing at all if the driver needs reinstallation, but if you do see the gui, and login thing, and then kdm simply will not start kde, that's almost certainly because of a full / or /home partition. And this is yet another reason I find the strategy of putting /home in / so silly, as if more reasons were needed. The user data is in /home, but / is what fills up if you say forget to run apt-get clean or aptitude clean, both in the smxi cleanup section.

I faintly remember a few more kde issues for the 4 conversion, but I didn't see anything that major during two kde 3 to 4 upgrades I used smxi for, so it's still working fine as far as I know.

and thoughtlessly filling /home with say audio or video files if you have /home separate doesnt' affect root at all in /, so you can always keep working to fix it as root no matter what.

By the way, this full hard disk issue, for / and /home, is why I added the disk usage information in the initial smxi information section.
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Yes I do need to repartition one day and make that right. I guess my noob status (and really still not sure) caused me to install everything in just /. Need to fix that thanks for reminding me.
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h2,

but if someone forgets to clean up, then it still would be a problem when / gets full, is that not the case?

Surely the point is that users should clean up regularly and keep big files such as video on another partition from both / and /home.

I used to have a separate /home partition, but decided (probably wrongly) that it wasn't worth it. I do put all my important data, video, audio files on a separate partition.
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I think the main point of /home is that what users do without root privileges should never affect root itself. That's how I look at it. And yes, I usually put data in its own partition, but only if the hard disk is large enough to warrant such partitioning, or, better yet, if I have multiple disks.
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h2, thanks

I'll try it again this evening. I'll do a dist-upgrade and then load the native driver and get back here with the result. I think I already did this with no help but I'll try it again. Hate to give up on this install.
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OK, ran smxi again and installed the native xorg driver and that all went to completion without errors. My choices at the end are "quit" or start up the window manager (don't recall the exact wording). In either case, the same problem: login screen comes up but when I enter my password, it tries to load the window manager but pops right back to the login screen. Is there another driver that works better for this nvidia 6200 card?
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