I have 2 users defined on my Gentoo system One starts KDE4 nicely and runs well.
The other (the one I use most of the time) will not start properly.
The desktop is displayed briefly, and then the screen goes white. A small window appears with a progress bar supposedly showing akonadiserver startup.
Then I get a window, which does not really remain visible long enough to read it all. I think it shows the startup steps and resulting status.

The bottom line is: I'm left with a white screen, and no mouse or keyboard activity allows me to continue. The cursor moves, but I cannot get past the white screen to get to the configuration tools that postings I seen refer to.

One posting said that korganizer starts akonadi. I don't think I'm using it. If I am, how do I prevent it from starting, using just the command line?

Another posting indicated it's a mysql problem.
My Mandriva netbook has a /etc/akonadi/mysql-global.conf. Would that be useful?

help!

KDE 3.5 Is all I need. Now it seems Gentoo is dropping it, forcing me to move to KDE4. I like the features of 3.5, including different wallpaper for each desktop. If I do not stop having KDE4 problems soon I will likely abandon it. If I have to learn something new, I'll pick something that is a lot easier to work with.

If you've copied the .kde-directory in order to carry the other users settings, it may be a problem with the permissions within your .kde directory.

So I ended up with fvwm2...

In fact there are a lot of WMs but it may take a lot of time to try them out. In my opinion KDE-3.5 was nearly perfect (very fast with Gentoo and Slackware and easy to adapt to my needs) which it makes very difficult to substitute it completely.

Markus

Permissions were not the problem. I still have not cracked it, but I created a new user and it works. I will transfer my data files and delete the user that does not work.

I will still look for another wm.

The fact is that kde3 is unsupported upstream already, and so is qt3. So it's dying in *all* distros, not just Gentoo. There's nothing that distro maintainers can do, maintaining kde is not like picking a snapshot of of cdparanoia and letting in frozen in your repositories forever.

All the kde3 stuff is being moved to an overlay, and it will continue to be there as long as there are enough interested users to keep it working, there will be Gentoo devs around of course, but the overlays are, in nature, unsupported. It will eventually die of course, Gentoo can't do anything against that. It's an issue that belongs upstream, distros just can't do the work that belongs upstream for all the package, and kde is a big big monster.

I know... It's called "Progress".
Every once in a while I get dragged, kicking and screaming, into the present.
I am making progress. I've got working desktops, and I found a posting that described how to get different wallpaper for different desktops using something called activities. I even worked out how to assign activities to desktops. Unfortunately all the icons I add to the desktop from the K menu go to the same activity.

Still hacking...
Jim