Gus Wirth wrote:
> 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.
> 

Wonder why runlevel-3 + startx worked?

Regards,
..jim


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