I'm trying to set up a new CentOS 4.2 desktop, and gdm refuses to start. It blanks the screen, displays the swirling blue circle mouse cursor that appears to be an hourglass equivalent, then drops back to the console window. It repeats this several times then displays the following error:
The display server has been shut down about 6 times in the last 90 seconds, it is likely that something bad is going on. I will wait for 2 minutes before trying again on display :0.
xdm works, and I can access X Windows by running startx.
Any ideas on how to troubleshoot? It's a fresh install with a few site-specific customizations, but I don't think that I've done anything that would intefere with gdm. It is a relatively minimal install, so it's possible that I'm missing some needed package.
Thanks.
Josh Kelley
On 1/16/06, Josh Kelley joshkel@gmail.com wrote:
Any ideas on how to troubleshoot? It's a fresh install with a few site-specific customizations, but I don't think that I've done anything that would intefere with gdm. It is a relatively minimal install, so it's possible that I'm missing some needed package.
Check in the logs to see if there's anything that will shed some light. /var/log/Xorg.0.log I believe.
-- Jim Perrin System Architect - UIT Ft Gordon & US Army Signal Center
On 1/16/06, Jim Perrin jperrin@gmail.com wrote:
On 1/16/06, Josh Kelley joshkel@gmail.com wrote:
Any ideas on how to troubleshoot? It's a fresh install with a few site-specific customizations, but I don't think that I've done anything that would intefere with gdm. It is a relatively minimal install, so it's possible that I'm missing some needed package.
Check in the logs to see if there's anything that will shed some light. /var/log/Xorg.0.log I believe.
There are two warnings there: (WW) ATI(0): Cannot shadow an accelerated frame buffer. (WW) ATI(0): I2C bus Mach64 initialisation failure. I don't think that these are relevant (since X works if I run it directly via startx). No other messages look out of the ordinary to me.
/var/log/gdm/* has no useful info either.
Josh Kelley
On 1/16/06, Josh Kelley joshkel@gmail.com wrote:
I'm trying to set up a new CentOS 4.2 desktop, and gdm refuses to start. It blanks the screen, displays the swirling blue circle mouse cursor that appears to be an hourglass equivalent, then drops back to the console window. It repeats this several times then displays the following error:
The display server has been shut down about 6 times in the last 90 seconds, it is likely that something bad is going on. I will wait for 2 minutes before trying again on display :0.
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.)
Josh Kelley
On Tue, 2006-01-17 at 12:39 -0500, Josh Kelley wrote:
On 1/16/06, Josh Kelley joshkel@gmail.com wrote:
I'm trying to set up a new CentOS 4.2 desktop, and gdm refuses to start. It blanks the screen, displays the swirling blue circle mouse cursor that appears to be an hourglass equivalent, then drops back to the console window. It repeats this several times then displays the following error:
The display server has been shut down about 6 times in the last 90 seconds, it is likely that something bad is going on. I will wait for 2 minutes before trying again on display :0.
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.)
Josh Kelley
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.
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
-
Jim Perrin -
Johnny Hughes -
Josh Kelley