[clue-tech] Managed to "pooch" my display

[foo7775 at comcast.net]

Well, when I made the switch from WinDoze, I knew that it was just a matter of time before I had to write this post...  A bit of background: 



My machine is an ordinary  2.8 GHz P-4 Vaio laptop, pretty much stock except that I've bumped up the RAM to 1.5 Gb.  Video is provided via an ATI   Radeon chipset.  I installed Fedora 10, then not too long ago, allowed it to upgrade to v. 11.  All has worked well for a while, RedHat is *MUCH* improved from the last time I tried to make the switch (back in the RH3/RH4 time-frame).  I started by using Gnome, used that for maybe 5 or 6 weeks, then switched to KDE so that I could make up my mind which I liked best. 



Last night my system booted up with a gray & white checkerboard background, rather than the image that I'd previously set.  Because of that, I was looking for the applet that allows the user to set the resolution & desktop wallpaper, & in the process of doing so, I decided to enable the "desktop cube" that shows all open windows on a cube.  Shortly thereafter, I found the applet that allows you to switch between KDE & compiz.  Figured I'd give that a shot (just to check it out) & promptly inflicted upon myself the dreaded "compiz white screen". 



For those unfamiliar, this allows you to do anything you want at a command prompt, but when you try to boot into graphical mode as the afflicted user, you are greeted with a plain white window with a mouse cursor & nothing else.  I've switched to alternate desktops & logged into the cmd-line environment in an effort to undo what I've done, but so far, the bullet is still in my foot.  ;~) 



I haven't really made any changes since then, I've found a few pages that appear to describe this issue, but either they don't present solutions, or the solutions that they offer haven't resolved the issue for me.  (There have also been a couple that are just too low-level -IOW, close to the hardware- for me to interpret properly.) 



I'm actually a bit glad for this, as it presents an excellent learning opportunity for me.  I've never been too knowledgeable about X, it's always seemed a bit baroque, with lots of interlocking pieces - an impression which has been reinforced as I've tried to diagnose this issue.  I've tried checking man pages for X, X11 & Xorg, and worked my way over the xinitrc, Xclients, & startkde scripts, but if the answer was there, I just couldn't see it.  I also found a page which suggested that someone affected by this should remove the ~/.kde/env/kdewm.sh file, so I renamed mine (just in case), but no luck.  I also edited the KDEWM line in the file to point to kwin, but that made no difference either. 



Finally, I've looked through the compiz files in my home directory (since I'm thinking that it's likely to be profile-specific), but haven't found anything there.  All that I really want to do is to get back to KDE, or in other words, undo (using the cmd line) what I accidentally did to myself with the GUI. 



Any troubleshooting suggestions (or explanatory theses on how X works) gratefully received. 



Thanks all, 



T.
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