KDE-Forum.org

Hi Group,
I have gotten self into a bit of a mess, and would greatly appreciate some help. I am finding that small upgrades can lead to spending dozens of hours, and ending up in a worse spot that by doing nothing. Right now, I have no windowing functionality in Linux at all.

Anyway, I decided to upgrade my KDE to the current release (3.4.1) on my Slackware 9.1 system. This seemed innocent enough; I d/loaded the .tgz files and installed with upgradepkg.
The install messages were fine, but startx failed, could not start kdeinit, and the reason was inability to load shared file libidn.so.11. Seeking help on the web (from another machine's browser), others had encountered this, and recommended install of another package libidn (GNU Int. Domain Name lib), and that is what I did.
New message from startx : couldn’t find libXerama.so.1. More help on the web advised to upgrade X itself. I dutifully downloaded the XFree86 4.5.0 binaries, ensuring that I had right binary distribution: it comes with an aid “Xinstall.sh -check” which I ran, and was told I must download Linux-ix86-glibc23 . Again, I did this, installing all 11 mandatory files (and a few of the optional ones (of which there are 13).
Again the install messages (from X) were fine, but startx failed, could not start kdeinit, and the reasons appear in two categories
a) /lib/libc.so.6 version ‘GLIBC_2.3.4’ not found, (required by /opt/kde/lib/libkdecore.so.4), and a second category
b)couldn’t find init font path element /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts, removing from list, and later:
xset: bad path element (#96), removing from list; possible causes are
i) Dir doesn’t exist or wrong permission
ii) Missing fonts.dir
iii) Incorrect font server address or syntax
usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts does exist rw- r--r--, and has a fonts.dir of 2 bytes with a value of 0 therein.

So that is where I am at. Clearly I need to do something with glibc, but I would appreciate guidance. I don’t want to keep endlessly installing and endlessly failing, and getting into ever deeper waters.

And I am mystified by the fonts business, whether it is even from an optional X package (like Xfsrv, in which case perhaps it can be uninstalled)), or a mandatory one.
I realize I have to attack this piece by piece, and appreciate any help I can get. Right now, I have no windowing environment at all

toyg
Many thanks
What I did was "back out" - uninstall - the new KDE - and re-install from Slackware 9.1 CD's. Perhaps the new glibc was a documented pre-req for KDE, but I did not see that.

After a couple of hiccups (rebuiling of desktop references.shortcuts), the most current X remains in place, it works, with the "old" KDE. Perhaps in future, I will either look more carefully for pre-requisites, and/or upgrade the entire system, altho' it seems to me that an upgrade of the desktop should not require such a major thing.
Thanks
George