On 1/17/06, Johnny Hughes mailing-lists@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