Dear Sirs-- I am a relatively new (and novice) user of KDE via the Mandrake 10.0 official release. I am having several problems, which the instructions and help manuals (when and if I can access them on my system, which is not reliable) do not clearly resolve.
First I am thoroughly confused about how to make my system request a password and user name upon boot, without also losing the ability to have three options at logoff (those being 1) only end session 2) shut down, 3) whatever the third option is, which I forget). I have tried using the desktop wizard, but this does nothing to resolve this question. Neither do any of the instruction manuals I have seen so far give nearly enough detail about these options. I have tried using the Control Center, but this only supplies a login after an option length of screen saver time; there is no option I can easily identify that allows me to set up the requirement for a request for user name and password at boot. The passwords section of the Control Center offers no solution. Moreover, I have no idea what the "Echo charaters As" options mean or whether these apply only to root passwords, screensaver passwords or system passwords. Apart from an expanation of the importance of passwords upon system installation, the guidebooks are completely deficient on this important matter. I have a child I MUST keep off my computer, and merely shutting it off will not keep him off the internet when I am not home, as without a boot password, he could turn it on and access things without my permission. But I don't want to install a password at boot at the expense of losing the ooption to shut down completely; that was what happened the last time I changed password settings in the login manager section. It seems that leaving uusers "not hidden" is the only way to maintain the standard three options at logoff. Change that, and I lose the three options and can't shut down completely without pulling the plug all together. Another thing that changes if these settings change is the ability for everyone to log off locally. I don't WANT to kill that ability. I want to be able to kill my local operations, as I am the only user on one computer plugged directly to the internet. "Remote" loggoff for everyone is useless for me, unless I don't understand the terminology. If I leave the "enable auto login" checked for my user name, I also maintain the three options at shutdown, but if I switch off that auto-login, all kinds of other settings on the login-manager shift automatically, and I lose control. Another problem is with "parsing" I frequently get error messages when I attempt to access the help feature. The error says the file does not exist, or that KDE cannot parse the file. Additionally, I have been unable to resolve issues that have arisen from the upgrade of the kernel I did this week. I now seem to have several kernels on the system, and I have received an error when attempting to access the "User Account" item from the KDE menu; it says "There was an error loading the module; An error occured during your last KDE upgrade leaving an orphaned control module" or "You have old third party modules lying around." It's possible I loaded more items than I should have, since kernels cannot (horribly) be updated automatically, and those of us who are not computer geeks are lost and out of luck. I felt great that I managed to upgrade the kernel. Wow! But Lord, I have no idea how to fix "orphan modules" or "third party" modules much less find them. I have no idea what they are! Simply instructing me to "check these points carefully," as the details of the error message note, is about as useless an instruction as they come. Like HOW?????? (Especially since my "find" program also does not work. Another question is why "Dr web" has come up as a user? It's a virus program, isn't it? Not a user? But after I installed that program, Dr. Web appeared as a user, and I can't get rid of it. Other than that, I'd like to thing that KDE might be better than suffering virus attacks every five minutes on Windows. But trying to figure of "Geek" instructions is taking up way too much time at this point, and distracting me from the work I got this computer to do--WRITE (not about technology, but journalism.) And finally, there are the questions of how to make multi-media run, and how to extract a tar ball, whatever that is. Downloading new upgrades to my desktop is proving fairly useless since I have no idea how to extract or execute files, or where in the tree they are supposed to go. In fact, I have no familiarity with the tree or the extensions or how to use them, which probably explains why about half the programs on the machine don't seem to work. Maybe I need to do something with "file associations" but I can't for the life of my figure out what or how. Again, something not explained at all clearly in the guidebooks. Many thanks in advance for any assistance you can offer. I am slightly desperate. Naturally I will send other concerns as they arise. Your help with these would be most welcome. Best regards-- Alyssa A. Lappen
