Yes, well.... Ahem. (Cough, cough.) Have you seen the latest images from the Cassini spacecraft, orbiting Saturn?

When you run startx (a front end for xinit), it gets setup information from .xinitrc or, preferably, .xsession in your home directory. KDE, though, looks to .kde and the subdirectory .kderc.

So maybe it's a hosed configuration after all. Last week something mysteriously happened to my setup for gnome, which a couple of my other Linuxes use. But even Knoppix complains about gnome when it starts KDE!

The universe is a strange and wonderful place. Imagine - methane in the Martian atmosphere! Methane won't persist for more than a few centuries, so something - maybe something alive - produced it not very long ago.

I suspect that that same something is messing with our config files. After all, scientists have identified 32 meteorites on earth which came from Mars. They could have carried viruses...!

-- Ed