KDE-Forum.org

I have an old notebook (HP Centrino Duo 1.66GHz) which has been running kubuntu Lucid - KDE 4.4.5 for a long time. Recently the hinge broke and took the (widescreen) display with it. Now I have it connected to an old 4:3 external monitor.

That worked fine for awhile, but, recently, KDE stopped working. When I login, it displays the splash screen. The first two icons fade into view then the next two either show up correctly or stop half faded in. The last one, the large KDE icon doesn't show up at all. After a short time, the system freezes and has to be turned off to be restarted.

The external monitor is not correctly configured until KDE starts to load, so I cannot (usually) see the grub menu or anything else before that.

What I've tried (none of which fixed it):

1) Added "text" to the grub boot options so it comes up to a text login that works. I can test the problem from there by typing startx.

2) Used apt-get to update all my packages.

3) Ran e2fsck on /home and another automounted partition and updated the bad blocks tables. (Did not run it on /).

4) Looked through dmesg, Xorg.0.log, and debug in /var/log... and nothing jumped out at me as an error

5) Logged in as another user - same thing

6) Sometimes (I'm not sure how), I can get a readable grub menu and I've tried booting with the last 3 or 4 kernels I still have installed.

7) Booted from a kubuntu lucid live CD. Comes up fine, so it's not hardware. (I still can't see anything until KDE displays the splash screen.)

I saw a post on the web where someone removed all things KDE and then installed kubuntu-desktop. I started down that route, but apt-get said it was going to uninstall a large number of packages and I didn't know how I was going to be sure I got them all back afterwards, so I didn't proceed.

I'm open to any suggestions, but think it would be good if there was a way I could uninstall KDE and then reinstall it - preferably without uninstalling all my KDE applications at the same time.

I use this notebook for everything. It has a lot of applications configured on it (lots of work - many days - to redo from scratch), so I would like to solve this without reinstalling kubuntu from scratch. /home is in its own partition and is backed up externally. The same goes for all my data, most of which is on an external drive to start with.