> I can start X by using "xinit" -- xdm STILL does NOTHING. At bootup, xdm
> runs, but there are NO consoles running X (C-A-F1 through C-A-F6 give me
> other text consoles, and C-A-F7 through C-A-F12 do NOTHING). ps shows
> getty running on consoles 1-6.
>
> I've never used xdm before so I don't really know much about it. I can
> kill the original xdm and type "xdm" again but this does nothing.
>
> What sort of things should I be looking for? What configuration files
> should I be looking at?
I installed debian on a machine the other day, and I got the same
behavior. Xdm would run, but the xdm login screen never came up. My
solution was to copy in my /etc/X11/xdm directory from another debian box
where xdm is working fine, and that fixed it. So I suspect there's some
file in that directory that's not setup properly by the x package.
Oh, BTW, does anyone else have an /etc/X11/Xsession file that is
executable? It was when I installed X on my machine, and this lead to an
annoying problem -- startx wouldn't work if you were in the /etc/X11
directory when you ran it! The reason is a rather broken (IMO) parsing of
the /etc/X11/window-managers file. That file has these comments:
# This file contains a list of available window managers. The default
# Xsession file will start the first window manager that it can
# in this list.
/etc/X11/Xsession uses this shell script fragment to parse the file and
run the 1st program in it:
for i in `cat /etc/X11/window-managers`
do
if [ -x $i ]
then
exec $i
fi
done
Unfortunately, this doesn't ignore comments in the file. So it checks to
see if there are any programs on the system named "This", or "file", or
"contains", ... or "Xsession" -- and if you're in /etc/X11 and Xsession is
executable, it runs Xsession again, resulting a loop that never gets X all
the way up. I expect that if you're in /usr/bin and try to start up X,
it'll run /usr/bin/file instead of the proper window manager.
Should I report this as a bug? And should Xsession be executable or not?
--
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"How appropriate, you fight like a cow." - - Guybrush Threepwood
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