I don't know what is causing your problems, but I can at least explain
respawning.
In /etc/inittab, there are certain processes that need to restart every time
they terminate. mgetty processes ... the ones that (among other things)
listen on consoles for login requests ... are the main example. If you look
in /etc/inittab, you will see a bunch of lines something like this one:
1:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty1
This tells init to run a getty process on /dev/tty1 (the first console). The
"respawn" piece means that every time the process ends and tty1 becomes free
(when you log out), init should start a new getty process on tty1 .
A respawn problem occurs when processes governed by a respawn entry in
/etc/inittab start and immediately die, causing anotther process to start
... which dies, starting another one ... and so on. init is smart enough to
spot this pattern, so it breaks it, sending a warning message to the console
and pausing for (I think) 2 minutes before trying to respawn again. This
doesn't fix the underlying problem, but it prevents the problem from tying
up 100% of CPU resources, so the sysadmin can get in and fix it.
It's hard to make *getty processes on consoles go into respawn loops. It's
(depressingly) easy to do it with *getty processes on serial ports, if you
set the *getty flags wrong. I don't know about X. If you start X by hand
(which is sounds like you do), with startx, the sysadmin's comment is
baloney. If it starts from inittab (probably as xdm), it might be correct.
To figure out what is going on, I suggest redirecting the error output of
"startx" to a file, so you can examine it later. DO so with a command along
this line:
startx >/tmp/xerrors 2>&1
to redirect both STDOUT (1) and STDERR (2) to the same file. The file name,
of course, is arbitrary.
Hope this helps. Good luck.
At 01:07 PM 5/9/00 -0400, Karthik Vishwanath wrote:
>Hi,
>
>It happened again! Left xlock on when I left last night after turning my
>monitor off. I came back today and could not see anything on the monitor
>after turning it back on. I entered my passwd and hit enter, I could get a
>glimpse of the desktop and it blacked out again. Everytime I moved the
>mouse, the screen would flash into life and black out again.
>
>I killed the server (ctrl_alt_bksp) and then all is well. Now when I
>restart X, I cannot even see a glimpse. Exactly the same thing happened
>yesterday when I mailed the list and it began to work once I rebooted and
>restarted X. I tried different ttys and it all leaves me with a
>blank-black screen on a 'startx'.
>
>Whats going on? Has anyone heard/seen such behaviour? I spoke to the my
>local linux-guru and he said that I was probably having a respawning
>problem. What is respawning?
------------------------------------"Never tell me the odds!"---
Ray Olszewski -- Han Solo
Palo Alto, CA [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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