Re: Much oddness

[Brian Cameron <Brian Cameron Sun COM>]

Calum:


> 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?

A good place to start would be to turn on debugging.  Find your gdm.conf
file (it installs into /etc/X11/gdm on my machine, though I've also
seen it installed just to /etc/gdm on other machines.  In the debug
section of the file, change "Enable=false" to "Enable=true".  Then you
will get lots of debug information sent to your system log file
(/var/adm/messages on Solaris and /var/log/messages on Linux I think).
This might give you more information about what is going on with gdm.

--

Brian