KDE Booting on an HD in a machine it wasn't installed on?

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Markp.com

Beginner

Posts: 4

Friday, September 24th 2004, 10:42pm

KDE Booting on an HD in a machine it wasn't installed on?

My old laptops CD Rom drive has died and its getting on a bit anyway so I thought I'd give SUSE a run on it (my first linux installation! YAY!)

So I took the HardDrive out of my laptop and connected it to my main computer. Downloaded and burned the SUSE install CD, installed it to the laptop HardDrive and it was all working amazingly.

I wipped out the HardDrive from the desktop, plugged it all back into the laptop and booted it up.

As I expected, there are a few problems.

Firstly, it wont boot normally... just shows alot of crazy ASCII text when I select LINUX from the green SUSE boot menu. This I expected.

So I select Failsafe this had some problems with it hanging, so I changed ide=nodma to ide=off and it boots to the linux prompt without problem.

I log in and try to start KDE, but it gives me a large error:

[code:1]xset: unable to open display ""
xset: unable to open display ""
xset: unable to open display ""
xsetroot: unable to open display ''
xset: unable to open display ""
xset: unable to open display ""
ksplash: cannot connect to X server
kdeinit: Aborting. $DISPLAY is not set.
Warning: connect() failed: : No such file or directory
ksmserver: cannot connect to X server
startkde: Shutting down...
Warning: connect() failed: : No such file or directory
Error: Can't connect kdeinit!
startkde: Running shutdown scripts...
startkde: Done.[/code:1]

then dumps me back at the linux prompt.

Any idea what I can do to sort this out?

Thanks,
Mark

p.s. I hope I posted in the right place!

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epte

Beginner

Posts: 23

Saturday, September 25th 2004, 1:37am

Low-level Xwindows isn't my forte, but googling for [code:1]"unable to open display" xset[/code:1] turned up http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=1889816&forum_id=4714 which says that either you haven't started X yet, or

Quoted

You don"t have your display set, so you must be running from a terminal
that isn"t aware that X is running. Easiest way to make it work is to
either start it from an xterm inside of X11...

... and the post continues about a fink-specific fix. Or maybe it could be something else.

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Markp.com

Beginner

Posts: 4

Saturday, September 25th 2004, 9:04am

Thats great thanks...

"Easiest way to make it work is to either start it from an xterm inside of X11"

Any idea how I'd do that above?

Sorry I'm new to all this

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Markp.com

Beginner

Posts: 4

Saturday, September 25th 2004, 10:54am

I've been told that maybe its the video settings?

Is there a way to start KDE with a default 1024x768 driver? So then I could configure the propper setup while I was in KDE.

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epte

Beginner

Posts: 23

Saturday, September 25th 2004, 7:39pm

First of all, can you confirm that X is actually running? Normally kde is started through something like gdm or kdm, which in turn is started when spawning an x session in /etc/ttys. If you don't have X running, then kde has no graphical environment to run in.

Secondly, if it's a graphical card thing, again I would look at X first. Its in X that those type of settings are set anyway, even (I think) when you change your resolution in KDE.

As a troubleshooting technique, maybe try installing and running a lightweight window manager, such as twm (comes with X) or blackbox. If those run fine, then yes, it is probably KDE. If not, then it's probably X.

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epte

Beginner

Posts: 23

Saturday, September 25th 2004, 7:43pm

Also, check the contents of ~/.xsession-errors (I think that's what it's called). If X has problems starting, oftentimes it will log to there. Check also /var/log/messages and /var/log/syslog.

As to opening kde from an xterm, that seemed a little obscure to me, and I was just passing along what I found. My first reaction to it is, "If you have an xterm, that means you are in a window manager. Wouldn't it cause problems to start a different window manager while already in one?"

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Markp.com

Beginner

Posts: 4

Sunday, September 26th 2004, 10:01am

Fixed. I had to reinstall everything, but its ok now

Thankyou everyone for your help.

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