[CentOS] GUI/X11 login and shells other than bash?

Sat Dec 16 00:48:04 UTC 2017
Stephen John Smoogen <smooge at gmail.com>

On 15 December 2017 at 17:39, Valeri Galtsev <galtsev at kicp.uchicago.edu> wrote:


>> 4. I logged in as ssmoogen. I got a GNOME desktop
>> 5. I opened a terminal and my shell was tcsh.
>>
>> That took me 10 minutes. Due to this I am going to say that there is
>> something wrong with other parts of the start up environment from what
>> the shell is listed as in /etc/passwd, if the user has specific
>> startup scripts .xsession items or some similar problem based on
>> 'shell cruft'. People who work on many different systems have to
>> regularly add exceptions and special cases or unadd them when they
>> find stuff breaks.
>
> Thanks a lot! I will go thoroughly through user in question ~/.cshrc.
> Indeed, freshly created user with tcsh as default shell does successfully
> log in and X11 does not crash on him. One pilot error: I didn't check that
> before bugging everybody...
>
>> I would also check to see if there is a post
>> configuration setup which changed /etc/shells on the system. Another
>> common problem is that the shell or startsups are looking for
>> /usr/local/bin/tcsh which doesn't exist.
>
> Quick test with creating user with shell /bin/tcsh makes user successfully
> shown on GUI login. However, changing that user's shell to /usr/bin/tcsh
> makes user disappear from GUI login. And the second (/usr/bin/tcsh) in
> actual location of tcsh binary, whereas /bin/tcsh involves symlink /bin
> --> /usr/bin ... My other playing around with making different default
> user shells didn't always yield reproducible results... so I'll postpone
> anything conclusive till later. But looking into /etc/shells (Thanks
> again!!) shows that only bash gets unique privileged treatment, namely
>
>

I think that is mainly from /usr/bin/bash showing up in scripts which
check to see if they are allowed to be run by checking /etc/shells but
I am not 100% sure on that. None of the users I see created by the
built in tools give /usr/bin/bash as default shell but there are mods
for apache and other tools which use /etc/shell the see if user
scripts can run as such. Because most scripts are written in sh versus
csh this is a more likely scenario to run into. [I am not sure even
BSD systems write many scripts in csh.. I have only seen one major
script since 1992 that was in csh.] However in academia.. tcsh is
still used quite a lot from professors and their students who learned
on old BSD so it may be more common to have /usr/bin/csh

I wonder if adding /usr/bin/tcsh fixes the gnome account problem for you.



>
>>
>> Red Hat has a lot of different developers using pretty much every
>> shell that is shipped in RHEL and some which aren't even in Fedora.
>> The developers also use all kinds of different desktops and software..
>> while this doesn't mean bugs won't happen.. it does mean that if 'Red
>> Hat' was out to eradicate other shells, there would be posts on every
>> hacker site from Red Hat employees who wouldn't put up with it.
>>
>>
>>
>>> Thanks in advance for all your answers.
>>>
>>> Valeri
>>>
>>> ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>>> Valeri Galtsev
>>> Sr System Administrator
>>> Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics
>>> Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics
>>> University of Chicago
>>> Phone: 773-702-4247
>>> ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> CentOS mailing list
>>> CentOS at centos.org
>>> https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Stephen J Smoogen.
>> _______________________________________________
>> CentOS mailing list
>> CentOS at centos.org
>> https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
>>
>
>
> ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
> Valeri Galtsev
> Sr System Administrator
> Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics
> Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics
> University of Chicago
> Phone: 773-702-4247
> ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
> _______________________________________________
> CentOS mailing list
> CentOS at centos.org
> https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos



-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.