Much oddness

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

Literally overnight, gdm has gone ballistic on my RH9 machine (a Dell
laptop).

The RH9 rpm version won't start up at all any more, it just thinks about
it for a while after X has started, then pops up what looks like the "an
X server is already running on :0" dialog, except with the words
replaced by "?~@:@#$!@", or words to that effect.  (The Yes and No
buttons are still legible, though.)

So, I uninstalled the gdm2 RPM and built my own version, which starts up
fine... but it won't let me type anything in, the username field shows
"..." all the time and it constantly pops up the "Authentication failed,
letters must be typed in correct case" message before I've typed
anything, as if some ghostly gegl is typing things into it before I get
a chance.  

Weird part... any version of gdm I build myself behaves the same way...
*unless* I reinstall the RH9 rpms as well, in which case the self-built
version (installed in another directory) works just fine.

xdm and kdm work just fine too.

This may be well some bizarre hardware issue rather than gdm's fault,
but does anybody know where to start looking?

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            GNOME Desktop Group
http://ie.sun.com                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems