Slackware Linux 13.37 : KDE Crashes on Startup

Okay, so I’ve tried Slackware Linux 12 and then 13.1 in the past, recently I’ve heard that 13.37 was released and I wanted to give it a try, everything went smooth but when I attempted to start the X Server (in case you’ve chosen KDE4 like me), I got that nasty error clearly showing that xinit (X Window System initializer), lost connection with the X Server upon issuing the startx command (click to enlarge) :

Well This could be a major turn off for a beginner! But I did some googling and a bit of tweaking and found out how to get around it.

First of all, it’s important to point out that ever since version 7.4 of X.org, the X Server configures itself automatically at boot time, in other words, the /etc/X11/xorg.conf is empty but in some exceptions (like in this case) we need to customize it a little bit.

So we’re gonna create a file under /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d (you can do it under /etc/X11/ and some other locations, see the xorg.conf configuration for more details), I use vim so it looks like this (click to enlarge)

The file (which I’ve named composite, but you can give it any name you want)will be empty, we’ll populate it here in order to disable the composite extension which prevents KDE from starting properly by adding this section:

    Section “Extensions”

Option “Composite” “Disable”

EndSection

Before attempting to re-launch X, make sure that you’ve already created  a normal user with the command “adduser” (never start X as root), log on with that user and start X, Voila ;)

Tip : You can change your Window Manager anytime by running xwmconfig at the terminal .