{SOLVED} - KDE3/KDE4 Upgrade - Strange Video Symptom {PCLOS 2010 KDE-4}

[horusfalcon]

Hi, Folks, and Merry Joyous Happy Ho-Ho Winter Solstice Thingy,

Just thought I'd drop a little info on y'all today (won't have time tomorrow and I would have probably forgotten it by then, anyhow...)

If you upgrade a machine with a "clean install" of PCLinuxOS 2010.xx KDE4, but you preserve the user's ~home folder, you may notice a ghostly square that covers the upper quadrant of the screen, and leaves a trace running down the middle and to the left.

In my case, it was my wife's computer, and I had just convinced her she finally needed to upgrade away from Mini-me 2008 to be able to do more with it about a month ago.  We did the upgrade, and she asks me Tuesday why her screen has this odd ghostly rectangle traced on it...

I racked my brain, I checked everything I could think of - no dice.  Hmm... look at another user (e.g., the root user), and no problem whatsoever - then it hits me:  the wife still has a .kde3 directory in her ~home!  Look a bit, scratch my head some, then decide, "whiskey, tango, foxtrot, over?" and delete the .kde3 folder.

Voila, the ghostly rectangle disappears!  So far, no ill effects on any other programs except abiword, and that turned out to have another solution already posted here.

So... y'all don't drink too much wassail, eggnog or other adult beverages during the holidays, and stay safe!  (If you do drink, for sure don't drive!)

Peace, Love, and PCLinuxOS!
D  

[Neal ManBear]

There's a good possibility of more problems in future.

The recommended method of such an upgrade is to back up your data, format all partitions (/ and /home, etc) and do the install. The settings in your 2009 install (/home hidden stuff) will interfere with your 2010 install.

[horusfalcon]

There's a good possibility of more problems in future.

The recommended method of such an upgrade is to back up your data, format all partitions (/ and /home, etc) and do the install. The settings in your 2009 install (/home hidden stuff) will interfere with your 2010 install.

Thanks for the heads-up.  I was lucky to get the missus to upgrade as it is... Now that she's had some time to play around with KDE4, she's beginning to see what she was missing and her opinion is, as most folks', a mixed one - some good and some bad.  

I'll be backing her data up and doing the reinstall right after Christmas is done with.

Thanks Again,
D

Hers is a LinPC.us "box" unit - AMD64x2 2.2 with four gigs of RAM, so it still cooks along pretty well with KDE4.  Can't say enough good things about the folks at LinPC.us... (and that's as far as I'll go here for now).

[Neal ManBear]

Yep. LinPC has good computers.

As that is an AMD 64bit processor, youcould use the a64 kernel. It works very well with them.
Or you could try the pae kernel and use every bit of the 4GB RAM.