Hi Olaf, I feel silly to have to ask you for every single step in troubleshooting the libraries for KDE. But try as I might reading about linking, configurations, filesystems & libraries and looking at the output of ldd or ldconfig etc. are two very different pairs of shoes. Actually, following your instructions things tend to become clearer and I am learning. Still, I am wondering how I made it past elementary school...

Something is going on here, maybe some mixed library versions? What is the content of /etc/ld.so.conf, is there /opt/kde2/lib? Mine looks like that: /lib-aout /usr/X11R6/lib/Xaw95 /usr/X11R6/lib/Xaw3d /usr/X11R6/lib /usr/powerpc-suse-linux/lib /usr/ppc-suse-linux/lib /usr/local/lib /usr/openwin/lib /opt/kde/lib /opt/kde2/lib /opt/gnome/lib

/opt/kde2/lib was missing in my ld.so.config. Manually I added it into the file and then executed ldconfig -v as root. The result of which is part of the attachment "linkS". There are two libraries where ldconfig complains that they are not symbolic links within /opt/kde2/lib.

what is the output of ldd /opt/kde2//lib/libkdecore.so.3?

See see the end of "linkS".

Maybe some shell scripting:

(for i in /opt/kde*/bin/* /opt/kde*/lib/* ;do echo $i;ldd $i;done)>/tmp/ldd.txt 2>&1

100+ pages of libraries attached only to you (ldd.txt) What do you do with all those library links??? I checked for ksmserver, kdeinit (mentioned in the error log after a KDE2 crash): there is an error in /opt/kde2//lib/libkdecore.so.3. Your shell script showed: /opt/kde2/bin/kdeinit libkdecore.so.3 => /opt/kde2//lib/libkdecore.so.3 (0x00fbb000) /opt/kde2/bin/ksmserver libkdecore.so.3 => /opt/kde2//lib/libkdecore.so.3 (0x01627000) /opt/kde2/lib/libkdecore.so.3 is found with a bunch of dependencies (For KDE1: /opt/kde/lib/libkdecore.so.2 is found) Now lgconfig -v tells me that: /opt/kde2/lib: libkdecore.so.3 -> libkdecore.so.3.0.0 Going back to the printout of the shell script: /opt/kde2/lib/libkdecore.so.3.0.0 is found with a bunch of dependencies I didn't check those dependencies of libkdecore.so.3 and .so.3.0.0. I wouldn't know how to decide if they are the right version or not. I also couldn't find a definition of // in a pathname, nor could figure out what it does. But I guess that that is not the problem.

Buying 7.3 is certanly an good option, but I think we can fix it :)

The evening before I got your email I broke down and bought a copy of 7.3. It is not opened yet. I have no idea how close we are to solving this problem. Should we be close and more importantly should you be willing, I would be very interested in going the troubleshooting to the end. It would give me a template how to go about troubleshooting in the future. Should this all be too convoluted and weired, drop me a note and I will initiating updating. Jutta -- ____________________________________ Jutta Buschbom University of Chicago Field Museum of Natural History Committee on Evolutionary Biology Botany Department 1025 E. 57th Street, Culver Hall, Rm. 402 1400 South Lake Shore Drive Chicago, IL 60637, USA Chicago, IL 60605, USA Tel: (312) 665 7846 Tel: (773) 702 4697 Fax: (312) 665 7158 Fax: (773) 702 4699 email: jbuschbo@midway.uchicago.edu email: jbuschbom@fmnh.org