Black Plague Demo mucked up my KDE/X settings...

[dlevey]

[Oops, posted this in the main Tech Support board originally...]

I installed the Penumbra: Black Plague demo yesterday on my laptop:

Acer TravelMate 4202WLMi
Inten Centrino Duo 1.66GHz
1 GB RAM
Intel GMA950, 1280x800
Fedora 9 x86
(hpl.log attached)
KDE4

At the end of the installation, there were no errors, though it seemed to restart X on my machine. After logging in again, I tried starting the demo just to see that it was working. When I exited it, I found that my desktop had been changed to 800x600. Re-entering the demo and changing to 1280x760 (the highest option) didn't help (and in fact it wouldn't run at all). I also manually changed the settings.cfg file from 1280x760 to 1280x800, but that didn't help at all (game still wouldn't run, desktop still borked).

I am unable to reconfigure my desktop at all. While the correct (1280x800) resolution is visible as a selection, the Apply/Save button is not enabled. This appears to be a specific problem in KDE; I can restart X and use another environment (Gnome) at the correct resolution.

What is particularly odd is that when logging in via KDE it *starts up* in the correct resolution, but eventually changes. What happened to my machine, and how do I get it back? It's probably just a configuration change in one file, but I don't know which one.

[EDIT: ICEwm also works without a problem. What's more, I can run the demo properly from within ICEwm and return to a 1280x800 desktop. This seems to be a problem with KDE4 and how the demo interacts with it.]

[EDIT 2: The demo seems to function properly with KDE3.5. It's 4.0 that's the problem. If I can determine the changed filename(s), I'll post.]

[dlevey]

For what it's worth, deleting the .kde subdirectory (~/.kde) regenerated proper settings.

[cloud]

Cool.
I would also want to point out that intel gfx card chip sets whilst supported in linux (cheers to intel for that) are NOT really suitable for games so I would be very pleased if the game plays averagely well on your lappy!

[ced117]

What ? You can play the demo under kde on your laptop ?