A follow up. I re-installed 12.2b1 (again to a live, not VM, partition) but this time used Grub1 instead of Grub2, and used sysvinit-init instead of systemd-sysinit. Just to see if it made a difference. It really didn't. I used the Factory KDE:KDE3 and HAL-enabled libraries. 1. Without including HAL-enabled repository, the desktop "Storage Media" icon worked properly, and insertion of a USB Thumb Drive and/or CD/DVD brought up the regular "what do you want to do" KDE query, and K3b could do it's magic. With HAL-enabled repo enabled and haldaemond active (incl a re-boot), neither the Storage Media icon nor device insertion works properly, nor (obviously) K3b. The first only shows the current root drive, and no KDE query arises from device insertion. 2. Kwrite and Kate fire up in both situations (HAL-enabled repo and daemon activated or not), but immediately freeze and must be terminated ... completely useless. Beaver, which I installed to test, works fine in both situations. 3. I can't get the ATI proprietary fglrx driver to install ... I suspect it's the newness of the kernel. 4. Ilya, is there any way to retrofit KDE4's version of Krandr to 3.5? -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-kde3+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-kde3+owner@opensuse.org