Dear gegechris99 and jackson312,

There seems to be some confusion. I'm just working with slack 12.1. I haven't even tried the upgrade to 12.2 yet.

As far as gnome goes, I'm using an older version of dropline gnome that I installed a while back. It may be the problem, but it played nicely with kde under 12.0.

I hadn't thought of downgrading the nvidia driver. I'll try that and see what happens.

Thanks,
Dan

Dear All,
I replaced my NVIDIA 180.06 driver with NVIDIA 173.14 driver and kde started up. Thank you all for your advice and help. Looks like another case of the NVIDIA driver not playing well. I guess that I didn't have it as removed as I thought while testing!

Thanks again,
Dan

This is one reason I like to keep handy an xorg.conf file for the generic nv driver. I can toggle quickly between the two drivers and immediately learn whether the proprietary driver and module are at fault.

Perhaps the following will help:

Switching X Video Drivers

I just want to add to the problem. With kde4 plasma crashes. And if i put it in ./kde/Autostart its working again.
But smplayer wont play movies, exiting with this error:
/usr/local/bin/mplayer -noquiet -nofs -sub-fuzziness 1 -identify -slave -vo xv -ao alsa -zoom -nokeepaspect -framedrop -input conf=/usr/local/share/smplayer/input.conf -stop-xscreensaver -wid 69206028 -monitorpixelaspect 1 -subfont-autoscale 1 -subfont-text-scale 5 -subcp ISO-8859-1 -subpos 100 -contrast 0 -brightness 0 -hue 0 -saturation 0 -nocache -osdlevel 0 -vf-add screenshot -channels 2 -softvol -softvol-max 110 /mnt/*.avi

dlsym vsprintf errornull)

Notice again the dlsym error. Is this slackware specific?
Also:
mplayer movie.avi is just fine, but
/usr/local/bin/mplayer movie.avi goes dlsym vsprintf errornull)
whereis mplayer
mplayer: /usr/local/bin/mplayer /usr/local/etc/mplayer /usr/local/lib/mplayer

none of this hapens with the 177.82 nvidia driver
Cheers
PS. krunner crashes with
krunner
kres-migrator(25419)/libakonadi Akonadi::Control::Private::exec: Could not start/stop Akonadi!
<unknown program name>(25416)/: Communication problem with "krunner" , it probably crashed.
Error message was: "org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NoReply" : " "Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus securitypolicy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken."

I don't yet know if this is driver specific.
edit: Yep its also driver specific. It works with 177.82.

Another report here that confims that it's related with the version 180.22 nvidia driver. kdm crashes only when I use this version.

The error message in /var/log/kdm.log is the same that other people get:
dlsym strcpy errornull)

For the moment, the workaround I use is to comment these lines in /etc/rc.d/rc.4:

# Not there? OK, try to use KDE's kdm session manager:
#if [ -x /opt/kde/bin/kdm ]; then
# exec /opt/kde/bin/kdm -nodaemon
#elif [ -x /usr/bin/kdm ]; then
# exec /usr/bin/kdm -nodaemon
#fi

It makes the script use xdm which in turn executes fluxbox with no problem.

Yes this should be related to the NVIDIA driver version. There already is a thread where we're discussing this:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...-slack-689679/