[H-GEN] General questions

[Jason Parker-Burlingham]

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Anthony Irwin <anthonyi at toolboxsoftware.com.au> writes:

Generally speaking, I think you needed to provide more information.

> I am running a Debian system and for some reason the wdm graphical login
> screen won't login any more.

What happens when you type in a valid username and password and hit
enter?

> So what I have had to do is login to the shell then type sudo
> killall -g wdm.

I assume this means that /etc/passwd isn't completely broken.

> Also for some reason even though I am logging in as my user evolution
> doesn't have any of my emails and xmms doesn't have my remembered play list.
> Does any one know whats happenning there?

No, but have you checked that the files in your home directory which
store this data across reboots still exist?  Try looking in
directories called ~/.xmms and so on.

> I would like to know if anyone has any suggestions on how to fix wdm.

None, because there isn't enough information about the symptoms to
attempt a diagnosis.

> I think these weird things are happenning because my computer powered off
> without being shutdown,

Perhaps.

> I think there might be corrupted files,

What makes you think this?  Have you found any corrupted files?

> would you agree with this assessment?

Not yet.

Try looking in all the lost+found directories on your disk.  There
will be one for each entry in /etc/fstab:

   [0]henry at freezer:henry $ cat /etc/fstab 
   /dev/hda4  /       xfs     defaults                0 1
   /dev/hda1  /boot   xfs     defaults                0 2
   /dev/hda2  /home   xfs     defaults                0 2
   /dev/hda3  none    swap    sw                      0 0
   proc       /proc   proc    defaults                0 0
   /dev/fd0   /floppy auto    defaults,user,noauto    0 0
   /dev/cdrom /cdrom  iso9660 defaults,ro,user,noauto 0 0
   [0]henry at freezer:henry $ ls -ld /lost+found/ \
                                   /boot/lost+found/ \
                                   /home/lost+found/  
   drwxr-xr-x    2 root     root 6 Jul 21  2002 /boot/lost+found/
   drwxr-xr-x    2 root     root 6 Nov 29  2001 /home/lost+found/
   drwxr-xr-x    2 root     root 6 Jul 20  2002 /lost+found/

[Please excuse the slight editing I had to do to make this fit into a
 reasonable number of columns.]

If there are files in lost+found then they're files which fsck(8)
found while the system was rebooting without being shut down.  In
general they need to be examined to see whether they're critical to
further operation, checked for errors (large runs of NUL characters
are a pretty common form of corruption), and then copied back into
place.

*IF* your problems are caused by filesystem corruption due to an
unclean shutdown, you will need to recover what you can from
lost+found and then consider if you have backups---there may well be
further filesystem corruption which you aren't noticing.

But on the whole I would suggest this is more likely some form of user
error and the unclean shutdown and the symptoms you're seeing are
unrelated.  You simply need to provide more information for us to be
able to tell for sure.

jason
-- 
Stay up-to-date on what I'm doing lately:
                                 http://www.panix.com/~jasonp

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