KDE 4.4 No Login / Black screen

**MoeNeigh** · February 12th, 2010

Woohoo! After the latest round of updates (about 45 or so), I am now able to see the login screen, and am no longer in recovery mode. Thanks, developers!

AFAIK, there is only one small thing remaining (that I've noticed), I still can't access desktop wallpaper folders from the gui. I can, however, modify the kde config file at:

.kde/share/config/plasma-desktop-appletsrc

Since I am using slideshow wallpaper, I search for "slidepaths" in the config file and change the folder(s) there.

**ComputerGeek31618** · February 12th, 2010

Originally Posted by DeDood

On my desktop computer however I have the same probleme as ComputerGeek31618 with the scrambled screen after the Kubuntu spalsh. My desktop has a NVidia graphics card so maybe that's the problem.

I noticed that switching between Ctrl-Alt-F7 and Ctrl-Alt-F8 a few times made the login screen appear and I coold start working in KDE. However, after a reboot I had to do the Ctrl-Alt-F7 Ctrl-Alt-F8 trick again.
It seems to mee that it are the Console screens that are scrambled and not KDE itself. Maybe KDE changes the resolution setting for the consoles or something.

Anyone an idea how to overcome this problem permanently.

My desktop has an Nvidia GeForce 6200 and my laptop has an old ATI mobility Radeon 7500. My desktop will log in (although it doesn't boot right on it's own), but the plasma is missing and it's black. My laptop goes black and nothing works at all. Possibly because of the package terror I've put it into. I'm trying to upgrade everything back to 4.4 on my laptop right now.

I think consoles are supposed to be low resolution on purpose as a fallback, but I have no clue why it would drop to a scrambled one during bootup. I don't necessarily think it's a graphics problem, but I wouldn't know. Since it happened on my ATI laptop too, I'll bet it isn't Nvidia at fault.

EDIT:
Through apt-get upgrade and apt-get dist-upgrade (a few times), my desktop computer is fixed and works great. All I can say is this, KDE 4.4 is definitely the best environment ever. No contest. (All in my humble opinion, of course.) It was worth the struggle.

Unfortunately, my laptop isn't any better. I think it's a graphics problem deeper than KDE because after login, I get a mostly black, unresponsive screen. When I first installed Kubuntu 9.10 (KDE 4.3.2?), it had some graphics issues that only worked out by fluke, and some of the old symptoms are showing at the new login prompt. It's my old, unsupported ATI card.

Anyway it seems to me like the only way to upgrade successfully from 4.3 to 4.4 is to follow your package upgrade with apt-get dist-upgrade to fix dependency changes in the new packages. Before you reboot.

**DeDood** · February 13th, 2010

Yip, the last update seemd to have done the trick!

**MoeNeigh** · February 13th, 2010

One little thing remains. I can't seem to change the wallpaper settings using the gui on the desktop. It brings up a black screen. The latest updates today still haven't fixed that. So looks like changing the wallpaper will have to be done from the config file for a while. Otherwise, I'm enjoying KDE 4.4.0.

**zaug** · May 17th, 2010

After upgrading to Lucid, I had similar issues to what ComputerGeek31618 described in his first post; black screen after login to KDE, alt-F2 would let me start apps, widows worked correctly, etc., just no panels or desktop menus.

For me it turned out simply to be that the plasma desktop package had not been installed during the upgrade.
Simply installing it sorted the problem for me.