[kde-doc-english] lots of questions

[Alyssa A. Lappen]

Dear Sirs--

I am a relatively new (and novice) user of KDE via the Mandrake 10.0 official 
release. I am having several problems, which the instructions and help 
manuals (when and if I can access them on my system, which is not reliable) 
do not clearly resolve. 

First I am thoroughly confused about how to make my system request a password 
and user name upon boot, without also losing the ability to have three 
options at logoff (those being 1) only end session 2) shut down, 3) whatever 
the third option is, which I forget).

I have tried using the desktop wizard, but this does nothing to resolve this 
question. Neither do any of the instruction manuals I have seen so far give 
nearly enough detail about these options.

I have tried using the Control Center, but this only supplies a login after an 
option length of screen saver time; there is no option I can easily identify 
that allows me to set up the requirement for a request for user name and 
password at boot. The passwords section of the Control Center offers no 
solution. Moreover, I have no idea what the "Echo charaters As" options mean 
or whether these apply only to root passwords, screensaver passwords or 
system passwords.

Apart from an expanation of the importance of passwords upon system 
installation, the guidebooks are completely deficient on this important 
matter. I have a child I MUST keep off my computer, and merely shutting it 
off will not keep him off the internet when I am not home, as without a boot 
password, he could turn it on and access things without my permission. 

But I don't want to install a password at boot at the expense of losing the 
ooption to shut down completely; that was what happened the last time I 
changed password settings in the login manager section. It seems that leaving 
uusers "not hidden" is the only way to maintain the standard three options at 
logoff. Change that, and I lose the three options and can't shut down 
completely without pulling the plug all together. Another thing that changes 
if these settings change is the ability for everyone to log off locally. I 
don't WANT to kill that ability. I want to be able to kill my local 
operations, as I am the only user on one computer plugged directly to the 
internet. "Remote" loggoff for everyone is useless for me, unless I don't 
understand the terminology.

If I leave the "enable auto login" checked for my user name, I also maintain 
the three options at shutdown, but if I switch off that auto-login, all kinds 
of other settings on the login-manager shift automatically, and I lose 
control.

Another problem is with "parsing" I frequently get error messages when I 
attempt to access the help feature. The error says the file does not exist, 
or that KDE cannot parse the file.

Additionally, I have been unable to resolve issues that have arisen from the 
upgrade of the kernel I did this week. I now seem to have several kernels on 
the system, and I have received an error when attempting to access the "User 
Account" item from the KDE menu; it says "There was an error loading the 
module; An error occured during your last KDE upgrade leaving an orphaned 
control module" or "You have old third party modules lying around."

It's possible I loaded more items than I should have, since kernels cannot 
(horribly) be updated automatically, and those of us who are not computer 
geeks are lost and out of luck. I felt great that I managed to upgrade the 
kernel. Wow! But Lord, I have no idea how to fix "orphan modules" or "third 
party" modules much less find them. I have no idea what they are! Simply 
instructing me to "check these points carefully," as the details of the error 
message note, is about as useless an instruction as they come. Like HOW?????? 
(Especially since my "find" program also does not work.

Another question is why "Dr web" has come up as a user? It's a virus program, 
isn't it? Not a user? But after I installed that program, Dr. Web appeared as 
a user, and I can't get rid of it.

 Other than that, I'd like to thing that KDE might be better than suffering 
virus attacks every five minutes on Windows. But trying to figure of "Geek" 
instructions is taking up way too much time at this point, and distracting me 
from the work I got this computer to do--WRITE (not about technology, but 
journalism.)

And finally, there are the questions of how to make multi-media run, and how 
to extract a tar ball, whatever that is. Downloading new upgrades to my 
desktop is proving fairly useless since I have no idea how to extract or 
execute files, or where in the tree they are supposed to go. In fact, I have 
no familiarity with the tree or the extensions or how to use them, which 
probably explains why about half the programs on the machine don't seem to 
work. Maybe I need to do something with "file associations" but I can't for 
the life of my figure out what or how. Again, something not explained at all 
clearly in the guidebooks.

Many thanks in advance for any assistance you can offer. I am slightly 
desperate.

Naturally I will send other concerns as they arise. Your help with these would 
be most welcome. 

Best regards--
Alyssa A. Lappen