After some multiple update runs (I didn't restart the machine) I can no longer boot into kdm. Because I updated multiple times I cannot say which update may have caused this behavior but as far as I can remember packages of the following components were upgraded:

- font config
- xorg-x11
- KDE
- some GNOME components

First I just thought it was kdm's fault - wouldn't habe been the first time. But when I logged in on the text console even "startx" didn't start my KDE session. The xorg log show's no errors (just some font search pathes which weren't found and some messages about XIM which seem to be normal by asking google). Also the root login - which I never use to start the x-server under normal conditions - didn't work.

While this still looks very KDE related (KDE is my system wide default WM/DM) I just tried to reinstall my kde packages. I grepped all kde packages from my rpm database and feeded it back to "apt reinstall". This didn't solve the problem, so I tried upgrading to unstable kde (3.4.92) which also didn't solve the problem.

I installed OpenBox and tried that - it didn't work. I tried fvwm - didn't work. I tried WINDOWMANAGER=xterm - well: That worked. X came up and started - pretty ugly for the moment. From here I tried to start OpenBox, fvwm2, KDE - all exited with a segfault (just the KDE starter got into and endless loop telling me DCOP didn't succeed and kded died). The only window manager working of all I tried is currently twm... Not very a blinky shiny thingy - but usable.

Next I tried to start some applications to investigate more on the problem. Opera didn't start, Firefox didn't start, konquerer of course also doesn't start. Only "links -g" works - well my new favorite browser - yeeeh-hah! *sigh*

It looks like every just a little bit more complex program just segfaults. Only simple programs work. I'm clueless currently were to start finding the problem. Any clues? Or anyone else experiencing this? Any clue which package it could be related to?

A friend of mine at similar problems at about the same time - but on SuSE 9.3. He managed to get it back working by uninstalling scim. But scim isn't installed on my system nor any other *im package. There are only XIM related messages in xorg.log.

If you need any more information please tell me. My xorg.log seems pretty useless in this case, and programs just print out a simple "segfault". Even stracing the programs didn't make me smarter about where to look for the problem.