I'm using Smart Package manager on SuSE 10.1 on my laptop, and I've enabled the suse-kde-backports channel to get the latest version of KDE rather than just the security patched 3.5.1 version. However, today I ran an update and, after rebooting, I couldn't log into KDE - I kept getting an error message cannot start kdeinit.

It took me a while to get to the bottom of it as I couldn't figure out where the log files were (still haven't found them, if anyone knows please leave a comment) and, because I'm using NetworkManager, I had no network connection if I wasn't logged into KDE. Eventually I ran startx from a shell and found the error: start_kdeinit: command not found line 332.

I had a look around and couldn't find the command either, so I opened up /usr/X11R6/bin/kde in pico and had a look at the line. In the spirit of experimentation I changed the line:

LD_BIND_NOW=true start_kdeinit --new-startup +kcminit_startup

to be:

LD_BIND_NOW=true kdeinit --new-startup +kcminit_startup

since I did have a kdeinit command. One reboot later and I was back in KDE with NetworkManager working. I'm not sure if it was the correct thing to do, but I do know it worked