Re: [gdm-list] gdm problem on linux laptop

[Brian Cameron <Brian Cameron Sun COM>]

Aime':

> I hope someone can help me with a gdm problem on my laptop running 
> fedora core 4 and gdm 2.6.0.8.
>
> The symptom is that when I boot up, the login screen is the wrong size 
> (or in some other way distorted) so that I can't see the login (or 
> anything), although I am able to log in.  After login still nothing is 
> visible.  I am also able to log in in parallel in "dumb term" (text 
> only) mode (ctrl+alt+f1 etc.) as myself or root and thereby I can detect 
> that the gdm login is working (by detecting the windows it opens) but 
> don't know how to make it visible.

It might be helpful if you were to play around with your GDM
configuration a bit to try and track down the problem.  The GDM
configuration file is probably in /etc/gdm/gdm.conf or
/etc/X11/gdm/gdm.conf (it is in different places depending on
what distro you are using, so you might have to search for it).

Note the "Greeter" key in the "[daemon]" section.  This will be set
to either /usr/bin/gdmgreeter or /usr/bin/gdmlogin.  Try changing this
to the other value, and see if that makes a difference.  If
the value was gdmgreeter and changing it to gdmlogin fixes the
problem, then the issue might be with the theme specified in the
GraphicalTheme option.  You might try changing the theme to
one of the default themes (such as "circles" or "happygnome") and
see if that works better.

Also note the "Browser" key in the [greeter] section.  Is this
true or false?  If true, try changing it to false.  Does this make
a difference?

Aside from this, a problem could be with your Xserver configuration.
If you have your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file set to use an weird resolution,
for example, that might cause problems.  You might try moving this
file aside (not deleting it in case you find you need to move it
back) and letting the Xserver use its default configuration and
see if that works better.

> A possible cause of this is that just before this happened I had 
> accidentally filled up the /home sector with a big copy operation, and 
> around the same time I accidentally xkilled the gdm tray (toolbar or 
> whatever).  I deleted a bunch of files under /home/ before shutting down 
> but I had thought rebooting would fix the tray issue.

The only file in your $HOME directory that GDM refers to is $HOME/.dmrc.
If this file is corrupted and you have the Face Browser enabled, then
this might cause weird behavior in GDM.  You might try deleting any
$HOME/.dmrc files and see if that makes a difference.  Other than this,
I can't imagine how any changes to /home would affect GDM.

> Do I perhaps need to re-install gdm or something?  I would appreciate 
> any help.

Let me know if this helps, or if you find any additional information
by my suggestions.  Hopefully we can help you debug through your
problems.

Brian