Re: gdm crashed and won't restart

[Riko Wichmann <Riko Wichmann desy de>]

Hello again,

so I improved the recovery a little bit by just re-compiling things
which obviously seem to have something to do with the display manager or
the desktop (including recompiling all dependencies):

- gdm
- gnome-desktop
- gnome-panel
- gnome-applet
- gnome-session

After that gdm and garnome started up again.

However, still have not the faintest idea what happened. The only
unusual thing that occured was that I logged out of gnome with a still
running grdektop session. It took gnome a long time to quite, much
longer than usual. But the problems described below only appeared after
the next login.

Cheers,

	Riko


Riko Wichmann wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> I have a very strange problem. I installed garnome2.8.2.1 as local user 
> on my laptop running xfree v4.4 and the garnome gdm as display manager. 
> For some time, everthing seems to be working fine, but at some point 
> something goes wrong, and I'm not sure how or what. I haven't installed 
> anything new in the last few days or changed my gnome configuration.
>
> The I noticed today, that I could not run a few programs (for example 
> grdesktop) and entries from the gnome desktop preferences anymore. No 
> error message or anything. just nothing happens. After I logged out, 
> apparently gdm had crashed and tried several times to restart until a 
> blue screen appears saying something like that "the displayserver has 
> been shutdown 6 times during the last 90 minutes ... something is wrong 
> ... wait 2 minutes before trying again ... "
> Needless to say, that after that crashed continued ...
>
> also changing the display manager to xdm didn't help, even though also 
> that worked before. With xdm I get as far as the garnome splash window 
> appear, but no services seem to start and whole thing crashed.
>
> That has already happened a few times, and so far I could only recover 
> from that by removing the gnome dir completely and compile again from 
> scratch ... not a very practical solution.
>
> I suspect, that maybe some gdm/gnome temporary files remain after the 
> crash which are reloaded and contain the faulty config. However, I have 
> no idea where to look.
>
> Any idea would be greatly appreciated.
>
> Thanks,
>
>     desparately, Riko