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Weird behaviour of GDM and KDM on kFreeBSD



Hi,

For quite a while (at least since before FOSDEM which was in February)
but not for more than year I have some strange problems with GDM.
Today I digged a little deeper and also compared them with KDM and its
problems.

The most important issue is that neither GDM nor KDM work cleanly
after system boot:

If I boot up my box with GDM, it comes up and the connected USB
keyboard does not work (but did in grub). USB mouse works fine.

The workaround is to restart GDM. So it seems to be a timing issue
during bootup or a boot order issue. Maybe a race condition with hald?

I know two ways to restart gdm:

1) Click on Actions with the mouse, choose "Run XDMCP chooser" (there
   the keyboard works already again) and when that one is up, exit it
   again by clicking "Cancel". Then mouse and keyboard work. (We also
   had also one case at LinuxTag where the mouse stopped working after
   that hack, but then the keyboard worked.)

2) Log in via SSH as root and issue "/etc/init.d/gdm restart".

If I use KDM I'm back on the console. If I then restart KDM (using
"/etc/init.d/kdm restart"), it works fine.

IMHO at least the above mentioned issues are of RC grade, but I'm not
sure where they come from exactly. Anyone else does have noticed
similar problems? Any hints for what to look for?

Then auto-login in GDM doesn't seem to work neither on system boot,
nor after the XDMCP chooser quits (see list of workarounds above), nor
after issuing "/etc/init.d/gdm restart". But it did work after running
"dpkg-reconfigure gdm" (when I switched the default DM to KDM).

When GDM starts up, it seems to take very long (a minute or so) until
there is a (non-black) picture or even just a mouse cursor on the
screen again, even on quite new and not sooooo slow hardware (EeeBox
with Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU N270 @ 1.60GHz)

The last issue is possibly related but seem to be neither GDM nor KDM
specific: After GDM or KDM has been started or restarted, I always
have to switch back manually from analog input to digital input (where
the computer is connected to) or turn the screen off and on again
(Meh, I sound like IT crowd.) on at least three (identical) Samsung
SyncMaster 2343BW I had connected to that box during the last months.
Looks as if the screen blanks even before KDM/GDM are fully up and
running, to it is possibly related to the slowness issue mentioned
above.

		Regards, Axel
-- 
 ,''`.  |  Axel Beckert <abe@debian.org>, http://people.debian.org/~abe/
: :' :  |  Debian Developer, ftp.ch.debian.org Admin
`. `'   |  1024D: F067 EA27 26B9 C3FC 1486  202E C09E 1D89 9593 0EDE
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