Re: X doesn't start [Was: KDE peculiarities and questions]

[Ken Heard <ken@heard.name>]

Kent West wrote:

> Log into an "ordinary terminal", and stop/kill any X-related processes.
> (Use "ps ax" and "kill" as necessary, or use other means such as
> "/etc/init.d/kdm stop").

	Earlier I had purged xserver-xorg and all its dependencies and
reinstalled it.  No change.

	Then I logged in as directed.  "ps ax" produced a long list of
processes, none of which seemed to me to be X-related.  In view of my
knowledge level, the fact that I could not recognize any of them as such
that does not mean they weren't.  "Jobs" returned no jobs; so there was
nothing for "kill" to kill.  I stopped kdm, with the effect that
terminal F7 was blank.

> Now as a normal (non-root) user, run "startx". What happens?

	I logged in as my user and ran startx.  It returned three lines:

xauth: creating new authority file /home/ken/.serverauth.3110
/etc/X11/X is not executable
xinit: Server error

	However, as root user I was able to run startx.  KDE opened in terminal
F7 logged in as root without my intervention.

> Also check /var/log/Xorg.0.log (or /var/log/XFree86.0.log) for clues,
> especially lines containing "EE".

	My user x-server-errors log file was empty.  I could find nothing
untoward in either dmesg or syslog, except the following line in the
latter, which really does not tell us anything we do not already know.

Feb 13 12:02:11 LAP kdm: :0[2736]: Session "/etc/kde3/kdm/Xsession"
execution failed: Permission denied

  The only other specific error messages I
could find were in kdm.log.  There was one line: (EE) AIGLX: Screen 0 is
not DRT capable.  There were three other (EE) lines saying that a
Synaptic touchpad could not be found and therefore was not activated;
but the Toshiba Tecra 8000 uses an Accupoint instead of a touchpad.

>> To make matters worse, an hour later I booted my desktop and met
>> with the same result: a fail-safe terminal emulator and a hung machine.
>> This failure happened to a P4 box on which I had installed Sarge and KDE
>>  in June 2005 when Sarge first came out.  Other than a few glitches
>> encountered on initial installation, it has worked perfectly ever since.

	Made the same checks as before.  No error reports in dmesg or kdm.log.
 There were two lines near the end of syslog, as follows:
	
Feb 13 14:00:22 localhost kdm_greet[2792]: Can't open default user face
Feb 13 14:00:28 localhost kdm: :0[2797]: Session
"/etc/kde3/kdm/Xsession" execution failed: Permission denied

> Run "ifconfig" and see if you have an expected IP address; my first
> suspicion is that zeroconf got installed; it tends to cause problems
> with networking.

	Ifconfig only reports the loop back IP address.  The IP address
assigned by the gateway, 192.168.0.114, was not reported by ifconfig,
presumably because the operating system cannot connect to the network.

	As I have managed to remove all my data from the Sarge box, fixing it
is not my priority.  Getting the laptop working is.  As I have not yet
any data on it, the only thing I can think of to do is to start the
installation all over again, this time using Etch RC2.  As for the P4
box with Sarge, I can think of nothing better to do and wait until Etch
becomes stable.

			Regards,

			Ken Heard