Bug#34074: xdm login loop failure has happend to a newbie
> Major problem was, after the test of X ran during install (which went
> OK) the screen went a nice, white color and refused to budge. I've had
> this happen on a couple other laptops with a C&T card in them. Only
> way out was Ctrl-Alt-Del, bounce the machine, and be done with
> it. Unfortunately, XDM was set to run on startup, so we got a
> wonderful blinky-blink of the text-login, in which you could type, if
> you timed everything correctly. C-A-F1 didn't work, niether did the
> rest of the F-keys. We couldn't telnet into the box ("Connection
> Refused") which is probably due to the fact that we interrupted
> Dselect in the middle of an install run. It was a mess, so we had to
> start all over again. Whee.
When I first started maintaining my Debian machine about a year ago
(which was the first time I was no longer just a user) on a box with
C&T, I had exactly the same problems. The only way I could solve them
was by reading Running Linux, figuring how to reboot in single-user
mode, switching off the xdm autostartup in /etc/rc2.d/S??xdm and
rebooting. Now THAT is not something we should be expecting new users
to do.
The 'proper' solution would probably be to install xdm but require it
to be explicitly turned on. For example, the user could be
recommended to try running xdm 'by hand' (by calling
/etc/init.d/xdm start) as root once X is working (as tested by startx
as a normal user). If this works, then rc-update.d could be used to
install xdm. Not too much like hard work, but may save some
heartache.
Julian
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Julian Gilbey, Dept of Maths, QMW, Univ. of London. J.D.Gilbey@qmw.ac.uk
Debian GNU/Linux Developer. jdg@debian.org
-*- Finger jdg@master.debian.org for my PGP public key. -*-
Reply to: