Re: GDM errors with utmp & FreeBSD 4.2...

[Erik Rothwell <erothwell callgtn com>]

Hello Martin,
 
Again, thanks for all your help in setting this up :)

> Erik> sessreg was writing utmp... so, I can either fix this, or remove
> Erik> it entirely. The offender was "$DISPLAY" which was logging :1,
> Erik> :0, etc. to utmp/wtmp... hm. Since X always runs on specified
> Erik> vtys, I wonder if I could simply change this value for each
> Erik> display to ... say ttyv8-11 which are :0-:3... hm...
> 
> This is exactly the reason I've refused to put utmp support in GDM -
> the X server isn't a terminal.  There's no valid path to it.  Assuming
> you had that path, you couldn't use it for anything terminal-ish like
> write/talk/whatever.
> 
> Furthermore, (on Linux) sessreg hasn't been hacked to support the pty
> filesystem, so it can't even register valid pty names.
> 
> Your logins on the console and any terminals emulators in X will be
> logged.  And that's what really matters.

True enough... I could, if the spirit moved me, hack together a shell
script to log each X login at some pre-defined spot like /var/log/xusers
or somesuch and remove the entry when the user logs out... so you could
run a command, say, who-x, and see who's currently logged in. I mean,
all in all, it doesn't matter too too much but it's nice to see who's
logged in when you're shelled in from elsewhere...

In the past this wasn't an issue since all X logins first went through a
regular shell attached to a vty... 

That said, I think I've got GDM running pretty smoothly now... the only
errors I'm left with are strange errors which gdmlogin reports each time
it runs:

endymion gdmlogin[3155]: gdm_login_user_alloc: does not exist and must.

It's not very indicative of what does not exist but must ;) And
occasionally logging out will drop you back to vty0 instead of vty8
which GDM runs on...

Erik.