KDE 4.5.0 Upgrade - Problems with desktop

[grncamaro69]

I recently did the 4.5.0 upgrade on my Acer Laptop, and Desktop.

The laptop dist-upgrade went off without a hitch.

The desktop is another story.

It comes up to a normal desktop, except:

* Right clicking in the desktop is hesitant, or not at all for menus.
* If I get a program up, the screen has a second image of the lower screen in the upper half, disappearing when I left click in the lower screen.
* To get a window like Konsole to refresh, I have to click between, the desktop and app.

Would deleting the plasma-desktoprc file and restarting make a fresh rc file if there are errors here?

I noticed that this rc file on my laptop has entries for 2 desktops.
The desktop box file has ! 20 ! with 2 set as active.

I did edit this rc file, but it came back as the same number desktops.

I did the command line fixes dpkg-reconfigure -a, sudo apt-get -f install, sudo apt-get -f dist-upgrade, and all is ok there.

I even did sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop --reinstall. Still the same.

Any ideas to fix this, or are there dependencies that have to be released yet?

[doctordruidphd]

Re: KDE 4.5.0 Upgrade - Problems with desktop

You didn't mention what kind of video card you have, or your OS version.
If it's NVIDIA, the update might have tried to install nouveau over the top of your video driver.

Try:
SystemSettings > DeskTop Effects and uncheck "Enable Desktop Effects".
If that fixes it, it's a video driver problem more than likely.

[grncamaro69]

Re: KDE 4.5.0 Upgrade - Problems with desktop

Yes, My desktop computer has a NVIDIA card.

Thought about disabling it, but couldn't get to the system settings through the launcher.
Will try it out.

[grncamaro69]

Re: KDE 4.5.0 Upgrade - Problems with desktop

Yup! That was it!!!

Now, unload the Nouveau via Synaptic, or reset the Nvidia driver?

[doctordruidphd]

Re: KDE 4.5.0 Upgrade - Problems with desktop

If you are running lucid or earlier, you can remove the xserver-xorg-video-nouveau package. Don't remove the libdrm-nouveau package, that will zap several programs in your system.

But if you running Maverick, nouveau is installed along with the kernel, and you have to use this procedure or something similar:

1. Create an /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-nouveau.conf file that contains the following line:
blacklist nouveau
2. Run update-initramfs -u, then reboot.
3. If you set up an xorg.conf for nouveau, remove it (though novueau doesn't need it), and install one for nvidia (which can be done during driver installation, if you don't already have one).

Note that you have to do all of the above as sudo.

If you are using the proprietary nvidia driver, just reinstall it.