Gus Wirth wrote:
At the Installfest today at "That Technical Bookstore" I ran into a
weird problem with gdm (Gnome Display Manager) on a brand new Lenovo
(IBM) T60 with Fedora Core 5 installed.
The laptop would start up in run level 5 (graphical login) with gdm
providing the login service. If root logged in, X started just fine and
went into GNOME. If the regular user (jon) logged in, X would seem to
start, there would be a cursor (pointer) on a black screen but GNOME
wouldn't start. Eventually it would time out and revert back to gdm.
A second user account was created (testu) which worked properly with the
gdm login. In other words, X would start and provide a normal GNOME
session.
If the laptop started up in run level 3 (multi-user text mode) and then
have X started using:
$ startx
everything worked fine for all users.
The problem seems to be in how gdm determines sessions. It's like it
can't find any Xclients for user jon, or maybe there is a session stored
somewhere that is hosed. Or there could be a permission problem.
I poked around a lot in all the ~/.gnome* dirs and ~./gconf* dirs but I
haven't really seen anything yet.
Anyone seen this before? The workaround for now is to start in text mode
and use startx but I'd like to get this guys gdm fixed. Maybe I need to
switch it to kdm or xdm instead.
This problem has been fixed. The cause was the user trying to be clever.
He had set his DISPLAY variable in his .bashrc file to point to one of
the University servers, thinking it would be a good shortcut to creating
a session. Unfortunately for him, the bookstore doesn't connect to the
University (at least, not directly). So without a remote display, blamo,
no X startup.
Now that I look at his error messages it makes perfect sense, but he had
so many aliases and other crud that I didn't see it right away.
Gus
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