[CentOS] Re: gdm won't start

[Josh Kelley]

On 1/17/06, Johnny Hughes <mailing-lists at hughesjr.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-01-17 at 12:39 -0500, Josh Kelley wrote:
> > I finally figured out what was wrong.
> > /etc/pango/i386-redhat-linux-gnu/pango.modules was only readable by
> > root (permissions set incorrectly by the installer, perhaps?), so
> > gdmgreeter wasn't able to run.  I ended up looking through strace's
> > output to figure this out; annoyingly, gdmgreeter wrote informative
> > error messages to stderr, but gdm apparently discarded the output.
> > (If it logged it anywhere, I couldn't find it.)
>
> Just for the record ... the installer does this as mode 644, which is
> readable by all.
>
> I checked on about 25 machines and they we all 644.

I did some more testing, and it looks like the pango.module's
permissions inherit the shell's umask.  I think that I installed pango
through a Cfengine script, and Cfengine runs commands with a umask of
077 by default, so I think that's where the problem came from.

I'll probably log this to Bugzilla; gdm shouldn't discard error output
from gdmgreeter, and pango's install scripts shouldn't rely on root's
shell having particular defaults.

Thanks for the feedback.

Josh Kelley