gdm problems

[Daniel Burrows <Daniel_Burrows brown edu>]

  Hi, I'm trying to get gdm (fresh from CVS) to work and I've run into a few
snags/problems:

  (a) The directory (prefix)/var/gdm isn't installed with the right permissions,
     so I had to chmod it to 770. (it actually had less permissions, rwxr-x---,
     but gdm complained)
  (b) This is the real problem: No greeter appears.  In my syslog I get:
  
    Jan 11 09:24:54 palantir gdm[4131]: gdm_auth_secure_display: Begin
    Jan 11 09:24:54 palantir gdm[4130]: gdm_display_run: Server forked slave: 4131...
    Jan 11 09:24:54 palantir gdm[4131]: gdm_auth_secure_display: Could not unlink /usr/local/gnome/var/gdm/:0.xauth file: No such file or directory
    Jan 11 09:24:54 palantir gdm[4131]: gdm_slave_server_init: Xserver on pid 4133
    Jan 11 09:24:54 palantir gdm[4133]: gdm_slave_server_start: '/usr/bin/X11/X -auth /usr/local/gnome/var/gdm/:0.xauth :0'
    Jan 11 09:24:54 palantir gdm[4131]: Yo dude, signal 10 received in gdm_slave_display_init
    Jan 11 09:24:56 palantir gdm[4131]: Starting the greeter
    Jan 11 09:24:56 palantir gdmgreeter[4140]: No default session link found. Using Gnome.

    It looks like something is sending a SIGUSR1 to gdm, could this be the
  problem?  Other than that I don't have a clue--when I put gdmgreeter into
  Init/Default, it shows up fine (but, of course, can't authenticate since it
  doesn't have a pipe).  In fact, there isn't even a gdmgreeter process running
  at this point.  There's nothing particularly interesting in :0.log--just
  the usual complaint about not being able to connect to esd.  (pnpdump can't
  see any of my devices right now, which mainly means sound is dead at the
  moment.)


    If it is of interest, my system is Debian 2.1 running kernel 2.2.0pre6,
  with all other Gnome stuff built from CVS in the last 24 hours and working
  quite well. :-)

    Daniel