KDM won't start

[<lists@tomchance.org.uk>]

Greetings,

I've got a problem with KDM on a sid machine set to unstable
that is similar to the one filed in the bug tracker (#240027), and that
can be traced through various threads on groups.google.com, with no
solutions.

If I start up my machine, it goes to runlevel 3, and fails to start KDM.
It prints the message saying "Starting K Desktop Manager: kdm." but it
doesn't do much else. If I login to the shell and run "init 3" from
runlevel 2, the same happens. If I then run "/etc/init.d/kdm start",
kdm starts up fine.

I've noticed that "/usr/bin/kdm" and "/usr/bin/kdm_config" show up
in the process table when init tries to load KDM, and they stay there
for some time, but there is no entry for an X server... KDM seems to
fail to load X when run from init.

I've tried everything I can think of, hacking the shell script
/etc/init.d/kdm, removing, changing and reconfiguring X, xdm and kdm, to
no avail. I wrote a new simple init script, "local", put into it
"/usr/bin/kdm", and added it as default, with no luck. There's this
black hole problem that I can't get any closer to when init calls kdm
via an init script.

I'm completely confounded, and it's a pain because although I'm happy
to login and run the init script, this machine is for my parents.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Regards,
Tom