First time I created the user, it was just in konsole under xfce. Did it in the actual console this time and it did the complete process, creating home directory and so forth.

But logging into KDE with this user does exactly the same thing that it does when I try to start KDE with my regular user account. Could not start kdeint4....

this is getting frustrating.

I really must apologize. I assumed you were familiar with chmod options and I was less than clear, leaving it for you to interpret for your own situation. What I was trying to do was to fix a problem (or rule it out) that can occur a number of ways. One way this can occur doesn't affect most Slackware users because we don't use "sudo". In other distros if you issue a command like "sudo dolphin" to launch a KDE-specific graphic application there are libraries that don't load by default with just sudo and some permissions in your home directory specific to KDE will be changed to root. Other things can cause such problems but however it occurs it needs to be ruled out, I think, largely depending on what caused the problem initially.

The easiest way to do this is thusly

that should do it but you could get fancy with


Again, sorry for being oblique earlier.

OK, this means that it has nothing to do with your user account and something to do with your install. Have you touched anything in /etc recently? And what are the permissions on your /tmp directory?

chmod isn't something I've had to learn before, and I usually wait to learn commands til they're actually needed :P

But, I tried
logged in under my username, it did nothing to help. switched to root and did the same command then changed back to my user and tried to log in, again nothing.

is there any more info I can provide? I wasn't sure what all would be applicable to this.

It has to be a KDE problem because I can log into my other window managers just fine

I edit my fstab pretty much daily trying to get it to do what I need it to do, but thats it in /etc.

I haven't changed my /tmp permissions since I installed slackware - still read/write for all users

/tmp must be read and write for all users.

mistyped, it is rw for all users

Cultist, I'm heading out and I'm out of ideas in any case. Good luck!

can kde be reinstalled without totally screwing up my system? I'll redo my widgets and theme customization if I have to.

Yeah I saw that after I posted. There is something fuXored in KDE. What version were you running? If you hadn't upgraded to v.4.5.9 yet that would kill two birds with one stone. Alien Bob makes it easy with his Ktown area if you're using current.
http://alien.slackbook.org/ktown/

If you're using 13.1 you either have to narrow down with logs to find out specifically what is bad or shotgun it by reinstalling KDE.

If I could log into kde I'd tell you :P but its whatever version comes stock on slackware 13.1. I haven't updated from that

edit: If I upgrade to 4.5.9, will it break the stuff I already have installed?

It's a good idea anyway to take snapshots of your home directory so I would back it up somewhere and reinstall off your DVD. If OTOH this isn't a critical system I'd do the whole upgrade to current. I'm not all the way up to HAL-less KDE 4.6 yet but even 4.5.4 was a substantial improvement over previous versions both in a few features and especially resource management - it's footprint is considerably smaller. There's lots of help here and elsewhere for getting a good clean upgrade. If your system is new enough representing a fairly small investment I'd get the iso and do a fresh install of current.

Regarding current, I do get the kernel bug thing with it where about every 8th or 10th boot panics out but it is so early in the boot process that no file systems have been mounted in read-write mode so there is no consequence to a reset, at least not in my experience over 6 weeks now. I like current rather a lot and I did hesitate for awhile.

I'll try installing 4.5.9 and see where that takes me. Worst case scenario is I'm back where I am now with a newer KDE

Or was going to. It says 'Assuming you downloaded the complete directory tree "4.5.95" with everything
below'. How exactly do I download the entire tree? file by file?

I would advise to NOT update to -current. First figure out what the problem is. (In the long run, this is going to help you out, and adding another variable is going to add to your confusion and frustration.)

1. check and post the /var/log/Xorg.0.log after the error.
2. make sure you can log into another DE (twm).
3. make sure you have kept up to date with the slackware changelog for your version
4. make sure you have_all_ the KDE dependencies installed.
5. see if KDE will start from runlevel 4 (#telinit 4).
6. think back to what you have changed while you were using KDE (new graphics drivers?, KDE update?)

natex