Installing KDE - Some issues encountered

[glennzo]

I thought I'd give KDE a try since I was somewhat bored this morning but I didn't want to "groupinstall" KDE on an existing Gnome installation. I have a few empty partitions available so I got a copy of Fedora 17 KDE Live. I booted the live CD and got the expected KDE desktop. From there I chose "Install to hard disk". I stepped through the process and got an error about the point where the selected partition (/dev/sda8) is about to be formatted. Don't remember the error message but that's not the point. Rebooted and moved to "Plan B". I booted with the full install DVD and chose minimal install. Once completed I rebooted into the new installation and ran yum groupinstall "KDE Software Compilation". That went well. Then I ran yum update and did a full update on whatever was available. That went well also. Next I rebooted into the new "KDE" system expecting to see a shiny new KDE desktop but all I got was the command prompt. Ok, I thought, I need to tell the system to use runlevel 5 instead of 3. Using this link I changed to runlevel 5 (I believe). Upon reboot the system appears to be trying to get there but hangs at "starting sendmail". I waited a good 5 minutes for sendmail to finish but it never did (read "I ran out of patience") so I rebooted to runlevel 3 and disabled sendmail. Rebooted again but it is now hanging at the last service loaded (of course I don't remember what that was, don't be silly!). Anyhow, can anyone think of anything I may have missed? Something else I need to do to get this thing to boot to the KDE desktop?

Looking at the logs after booting the suspect system to runlevel 3, in /var/log/messages I see:

systemd[1]: Job graphical.target/start failed with result 'dependency'.

Wonder what that means in English?

[george_toolan]

It means that something is missing ;-)

Can you boot into runlevel 3 and use startx or startkde to start a X-Server?

[glennzo]

Originally Posted by george_toolan

It means that something is missing ;-)

Can you boot into runlevel 3 and use startx or startkde to start a X-Server?

I can boot to runlevel 3 with no trouble. Haven't tried startx or startkde but will as soon as I get back to that computer. Thanks for the suggestion George

[beaker_]

I'll bet fedora wants gdm installed but the kdegroup would/should have brought in kdm. If startx or startkde works, then my bet is on the display manager: manual configure or shove gdm in just to keep them happy.

[marko]

Or make sure you have a file /etc/sysconfig/desktop that contains:

DISPLAYMANAGER=KDE

That would make kdm run and not gdm

[glennzo]

@ george_toolan. Tried both. Neither worked.
@ Beaker. No love after installing gdm
@ Marko. /etc/sysconfig/desktop doesn't exist. I've created it and added the suggested line. Need to reboot to see if that worked.

OK. That didn't help either so we'll call it a day with this KDE thing. I don't want it bad enough to keep playing around with trying to make it work. If I decide to try it again I'll see if it will install from the live cd. If it does, good. If not, nothing lost.

Thanks for the suggestions guys

[marko]

KDE always works very well for me, but I always install it via anaconda at installation time with custom mode and select the KDE and Gnome desktops.
I also never install to hard drive from the Live CDs I prefer the full DVD.

There's nothing wrong with installing both, they won't interfere with each other. The only reason to not install them both is to save disk space

[sea]

Just to collect a bit of data:
1) minimal install
2) gorupinstall kde
3) symlink graphical.target |runlevel5.target -> default.trgt
4) Did you install a login manager at all?
That was an issue several times i tried a minimal approach.