Re: [gdm-list] Requesting for assistance

[Brian Cameron <Brian Cameron Sun COM>]

manarshi:

> Thank youu very much Sir for your fast reply .I logged in as root and 
> runned 'startx' to launch the GUI program and backed out changes I made 
> . Now I can log in as a root but while I try to login as normal user 
> which I have created , i get the folowing error message :
>  
> "GDM could not write to your authorization file.
> this could mean that  you are  out of disk space or your home directory 
> could not be opened for writing. in any case, it is not possible to log in
> contact your system administrator"

Your user should have an entry in /etc/passwd which looks like this:

testme:x:101:1::/export/home/testme:/bin/sh

Note that this line has several fields separated by ":" characters.
The second to last one is /export/home/testme in the above example.

The user which is failing should have a directory specified.  Does that
directory exist?  Is the directory owned by the user?  It should also
have 755 permissions.  Is all of this true?  If not, fixing the user's
$HOME directory to exist, have correct ownership and permissions should
fix the problem.

If that isn't the issue, then does changing RelaxPermissions in the
GDM configuration file to the value of "2" fix the problem?  If so,
then you can figure out what the problem is by setting the value back
to "0" and turning on debug in the GDM configuration file, and trying
to log in again so it fails.  Then you should find a gdm-related error
message in the syslog (/var/log/messages or /var/adm/messages depending
on your OS) which highlights what the problem is.  When the value is
0, GDM is picky about the permissions in your $HOME directory and may
not work as expected if the permissions are too permissive.  For
example, it will prevent login if your $HOME directory is world
writable, which is generally bad for security since any other user
on your system could modify your Xauth file.

Brian