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Today I installed Arch Linux on my old desktop which used to work just fine with Ubuntu 12.04.

The installation was successful and I installed SLiM session manager and xorg and all dependencies.

After that I installed kde and added the entry to my xinitrc file.

It doesn't matter whether I log in using SLiM or by running startx in tty, the KDE begins to load its welcome screen (if that's what it's called) and then my system crashes. Random lines are displayed on the screen and I have to forcefully reboot using the power button.

I thought it might be my system which couldn't handle a heavy desktop environment and hence tried installing kdebase - the same problem existed.

I also tried cinnamon, but lately I've had a lot of complications with Cinnamon even with the best possible hardware configuration.

What do you think could be wrong? How can I solve this problem. Do you recommend using any other desktop environment? I've been comfortable using cinnamon with Linux mint and KDE with Ubuntu before so anything similar would be great.

The VGA device in use would be:

NVIDIA Corporation C61 [GeForce 7025 / nForce 360a[ (rev a2)

And the driver that I'm using is:

xf86-video-nouveau
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  • Did you have a look at log files such as /var/log/Xorg.0.log or ~/.xsession-errors? There may be some clues in theses.
    – Levans
    Commented Jul 25, 2013 at 13:37
  • Considering the garbage on screen and the hard lockup, I'd say the video driver is failing to communicate properly with your display hardware. You could chase version hell on that, or you could reinstall Ubuntu, use Debian instead, or otherwise replace a deliberately bleeding-edge, and therefore quite flaky, distribution with something that reinvents fewer wheels and therefore has ones which tend to be more nearly round.
    – Aaron Miller
    Commented Jul 25, 2013 at 13:52
  • @AaronMiller if any distro is reinventing wheels it is Ubuntu. Arch is minimalist and reinvents nothing.
    – terdon
    Commented Jul 25, 2013 at 14:47
  • Instaling kdebase will not make KDE lighter. It just doe not install extra packages like games etc, any graphics problems will not be affected. You can probably sort this out by installing the right graphics drivers. Please edit your question and include your graphics card type and what drivers you are using with it.
    – terdon
    Commented Jul 25, 2013 at 14:48
  • @Levans No errors in there. It's really strange that it crashes all of a sudden. In next boot system automatically cleans the orphan data.
    – Chetan Bhasin
    Commented Jul 26, 2013 at 8:14

1 Answer 1

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It could be an NVIDIA driver issue. From the Arch Linux NVIDIA wiki:

Install the appropriate driver for your [graphics] card:

  • For GeForce 8 series and newer [NVC0 and newer] cards, install nvidia package, available in the official repositories._
  • For GeForce 6/7 series cards [NV40-NVAF], install nvidia-304xx package, available in the official repositories.
  • For GeForce 5 FX series cards [NV30-NV38], install nvidia-173xx package, available in the AUR.
  • For GeForce 2/3/4 MX/Ti series cards [NV11 and NV17-NV28], install nvidia-96xx package, available in the AUR.
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