[H-GEN] weird X hassles

Craig Eldershaw celdersh at parc.xerox.com
Wed Sep 15 17:16:04 EDT 1999


[ Humbug *General* list - semi-serious discussions about Humbug and
Unix-related topics. ]

>I CANNOT get xdm or an equivalent to work.  Well, the welcome screen
>works, but it can't start a window manager.

>...[lots of installing Xservers snipped]

Well I can't say what in particular you've broken, but overwriting one
of the config files seems likely.

The file /etc/X11/Xsession is probably where you are running into
trouble (check in /etc/X11/xdm/xdm-config for which file xdm is trying
to run, but Xsession is the default).  This file does lots of clever
things in trying to find what window managers exist and what one to
start.  It may well be that in installing the new file you damaged one
of the many files it relies upon.

I suggest you add debugging messages of the form
   echo "got to point A" >/tmp/xdm-debugging
throughout this file and then survery the output after trying to log
in.  Hopefully this will narrow down where you are dying.  Then you 
can manually track down what it's not finding (or whatever).  It may
be as simple as an empty /etc/X11/window-managers file.

Good luck !

Cheers,
	C.

PS.

>I'm offering a case of beer [0] to whoever gets the answer first [1]

Does that include overseas shipping ? :-)

[0] [1] NMF.

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