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Re: can't start gdm or login as user



Thanks for replying to me direct, the list has about a 4 hour lag time
today.
> On 2002-03-28 12:03:48, Dale Hair wrote:
> > My wife's laptop crashed last night and after restarting gdm will not
> > start.  I get a message 
> > 
> > Server Authorization directory (daemon/ServAuthDir) is set to
> > /var/lib/gdm but this does not exist. Please correct gdm configuration
> > /etc/gdm/gdm.conf and restart gdm.
> > 
> > and a blinking cursor.  When I press ENTER more services start up and I
> > get
> > 
> > Starting GNOME Display Manager: gdmgdm_config_parse Authdir /var/lib/gdm
> > does not exist. Aborting.
> >  already running.
> > 
> > and then the login prompt.
> > 
> > The directory /var/lib/gdm does exist.
> 
> Does it look like this?
> 
> drwxr-x---    2 gdm      gdm          4096 Mar 27 22:15 gdm/
 
ls-ld /var/lib/gdm shows this.

drwxr-xr-x	2 gdm	gdm	4096 Mar 27 20:54 /var/lib/gdm

> See if the following files are missing (you should probably only have
> the shadow files if you actually enabled that feature) or corrupted,
> typically disk crashes leave binary data in them and as these are text
> files it should be easy to spot.  If so, you will have backup copies
> named similarly but with a '-' at the end (passwd-, shadow- etc).

/etc/passwd and passwd- are identical and look coherent.
/etc/shadow and shadow- are the same except I added user dale to see if
I could login with a newly created user, and these files look coherent
also.
 
> > I can login as root and startx OK, but when I try to login as pamela I
> > get a message 
> > 
> > unable to cd to "/home/pamela"
> > 
> > The directory /home/pamela does exist.
> 
> With what permissions and what ownership/permissions, same question for
> /home.  Did you fsck your disk?

/home pamela 	drwxr-xr-x 27 pamela pamela
/home	was	drwxrwsr-x  5 root staff
I looked at my desktop system and saw mine was drwxrwxr-x so I changed
it on the laptop and it still doesn't work.

On reboot the file system was checked.  It is ext2.


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