Hi all, In follow up to my prior post on this issue, I have found a workaround, but have not yet clearly identified the etiology of the problem. Whatever it is, it is presumably unique to my system, though if anyone can replicate this on another FC4 system... :-)
The workaround involves booting to init 3 rather than init 5 and starting X manually from the console. I found this after going through some of the steps described below regarding my X configuration. In this way, LD_LIBRARY_PATH is preserved and RODBC works without issue in both ESS and the gnome-terminal shell start up script. Dirk was kind enough to send me an offlist e-mail yesterday in reply, which sparked some thoughts as I was away from the computer for a few hours yesterday afternoon and evening. Dirk's e-mail logically queried on any issues with gnome-terminal and/or the bash shell itself. Since this problem was new (this had all worked previously), I checked to see if there had been any recent updates to either gnome-terminal or bash in the FC repos. There were none, although there have been of course updates to GNOME, GTK and other libs. This got me to think about other updates since the last known time this process worked properly. So I spent several hours last night and this morning reviewing possibilities. The last Xorg updates are from last September, so these are not new. Other changes that I had made in the recent past include: 1. Modifying my xorg.conf to support nVidia TwinView hardware acceleration functionality. TwinView is like xinerama mode, spanning both displays to give me a virtual 3200x1200 screen, though supporting HW acceleration on both displays. Previously I had been using two X servers (also using the nVidia driver in non-xinerama mode) to support my dual display configuration. Reverting back to the old configuration did not resolve the problem. 2. The last nVidia driver update (8178) was in December and this process had worked since then. 3. There was an updated Cisco VPN client for Linux (4.8) to support recent kernels. The VPN client is installed from source. This normally starts up on boot as a service. Disabling the service, thus removing the kernel module, did not resolve the problem. 4. I had updated the encryption of several of my partitions on my laptop to use dm-crypt/LUKS with 256 bit AES from regular dm-crypt to take advantage of pending LUKS support updates in HAL and other system functions. Disabling the encryption (so the relevant kernel modules did not load), logging in as root and running ESS from root's home did not resolve the problem. 5. Just in case, I also reinstalled kernel version 2.6.15-1.1830 (running 1833 now) to see if there was any change there. No joy. I cannot locate any of the 2.6.14 FC4 kernel versions, as these have been removed from the repos, so it leaves open the possibility of something in the .14 to .15 rebase change. Other than routine system updates via yum, these are the only "self-inflicted" changes that I have made recently. If any of the above should spark some thoughts, let me know. My plans are to live with this for now. FC5 is targeted for release next Wednesday, presuming that it stays on schedule. I'll do a clean install with that and see if anything is resolved, perhaps indicating some other issue that is as yet unidentified. Many thanks to Dirk for your assistance. Best regards, Marc Schwartz ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
