it sounds to me that your problem is much more of basic nature.
* something like out of memory error on the harddisk
comes to my mind. can you check with "df" if there is still enough space?
* have you run and passed a filesystem check for any of your partitions recently?
* maybe there is some strange leftover in your filesystem, like a device file
or a regular file with no permissions that blocks regular operations. i dont know.
for the gnome errors i would rather refer you to the gnome mailing lists in other time,
but it might not unveil the root cause at all. something is more odd at your's.
that authentication problem is right now unknown to me,
maybe some device file that only has root permission whilst
any user should be able to read (and maybe write) it.
try starting "startx" as root and terminate your X11 with Ctrl+Alt+Backspace.
with some luck that cleans up anything.
there is possibly a bogus /dev/dri file or subdir which might need manual removal,
or something like that. can you check this?
-Alex.
-----Original Message-----
From: Ehud Rybak [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Thursday, January 09, 2003 19:00
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [XFree86] (no subject)
hello,
I got a server-crash error that told me to email my error to [EMAIL PROTECTED] I will start by going through how I got it. My problem is that I cannot logon to gnome. I can only logon if I am root. As any other user I can only successfully login if I try a "failsafe xterm" session. This is what happened. One day I must have messed with gdmconfig and when I went to logon again my login screen was different.
It used to be the default RH login with the blue screen, with the login prompt reading welcome to localhost.localdomain.
Now after all daemons are started and I get to the login screen I first get two popups the first says:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
your session directory is missing or empty
There are two available sessions you can use, but you should logon and correct the gdm configuration
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
and write after I hit ok the second comes and says
----------------------------------------------------------------------
The configuration was not found, GDM is using defaults to run this session. you could login and create a configuration file with GDM configuration program
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
I guess the defaults are what I see know, because the new login screen has a GNOME image and the screen is a grayish green and there is a timer indicating I have 25 seconds to logon. The options are as follows: Sessions> "LAST" or "failsafe GNOME" or "failsafe xterm" System> "configure" or "reboot" or "halt".
Now I can login as root perfectly. It is as if nothing was wrong.
If I try to login as any user in "failsafe GNOME" I get the following:
---------------------------------------------------------------------
This is a failsafe gnome session you will be logged into the default session of gnome with no startup scripts run. This is only to fix problems in your installation
------------------------------------------------------------------
Then error messages non-stop (It freezes my system) starting with
------------------------------------------------------------------
cannot display location
"/home/spacedog/.gnome-desktop" is not a valid location. Please check the spelling and try again
------------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------------
cannot display location
"/" is not a valid location. Please check the spelling and try again
------------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------------
cannot display location
"/home/spacedog" is not a valid location. Please check the spelling and try again
------------------------------------------------------------------
I also notice that the users wallpaper is loaded and his panel is loaded, all but the applets.
Then I manually restart
As root user I try to mess with gdmconfig and nothing happens, I cant create a new GDM session. I am stumped on what to do. There is not much info on what can go wrong and how to fix it.
I tried changing run-level to 3 and tried to use startx. I received:
Fatal server error:
PAM authentication failed, cannot start X server.
Perhaps you do not have console ownership?
When reporting a problem related to a server crash, please send the full server output not just the last message.
Please report problems to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
giving up,
xinit: No such file or directory (errno 2): unable to connect to X server
xinit: No such process (errno 3) Server error
Thank you
Ehud Rybak
