Bugzilla – Bug 147910
gdm login screen crashes
Last modified: 2006-02-13 11:31:14 UTC
I installed 10.1 beta3, Gnome default system with beagle-gui as an add-on package. System was running and mono started to eat system resources. The system slowed down (I do not know whether mono, fontconfig, or the kernel was the cause of the trouble) and I decided to reboot. Now, the gdm does not start properly. It always crashes before the login window is to be seen. X is up and running, I can see the Gnome busy cursor just fine. Do you need more info? Feel free to ssh into L59.suse.de and check the log files.
To make gdm start again, I did: init 3 install "KDE selection" configure "kdm" as the display manager with YaST init 5 reboot init 3 configure "gdm" again as the display manager with YaST init 5 Maybe, it was a temporary glitch...
Are you using autologin? Looks similar to bug 143940, bug 147910 and bug 147647.
IIRC, I started with autologin. then I switched to networking and disabled autologin. ATM, gdm is working but I cannot login anymore (neither as user nor as root). I'll try again with beta4.
I installed three systems with NLD10beta3 / gnome. On all systems I saw the following behavior. After the install things were working properly. I was not using autologin, gdm was working. Then I installed konsole, which I can't live without, even on gnome. This involved installing kdebase3, kdebase3-ksysguardd, sensors, kdelibs3-arts, hmm. Seems like there was another but I can't remember now. After installing these packages gdm would not start. I'd see X start, but then it would crash. Again, I repeated this three times with the same results. I ended up going back to beta2 on these systems.
I had a case recently where gdm wouldn't start up completely because I'd filled the disk (or at least that portion with the root partition). I don't consider that an important bug (though an appropriate error message, if it's possible to generate one under such conditions, would have spared me time in debugging the problem), but it's worth checking as a possible cause of "I used up some disk, and now I can't log in any more" problems. Just something to rule out... Of course, it if *is* a full disk, but it's because of some package using up a pathological amount of disk space (e.g. /var/log spewage, /tmp cluttering), we should fix that.
I need you to try updating your CASA to at least version 1.6.284-1 and test again. Let me know if that solves anything.
Ok, found the problem. User did a fresh install, and GDM was working. User installed kdebase3 with dependencies. The GDM greeter started crashing after that, preventing login. Turns out the crash happens shortly after parsing '/var/lib/gdm/.fonts.cache-2'. Moving it away solved the problem. I'm attaching that cache file and the strace of gdmlogin choking on it.
Created attachment 67730 [details] The bad cache file.
Created attachment 67731 [details] Trace of gdmlogin choking on cache. Seek to "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/URW". Notice that the next file name read from the cache is bogus, resulting in a bad call to stat().
I think jpr wanted this bumped to blocker. Doing that.
Hans Petter Jansson> Seek to "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/URW". Notice Hans Petter Jansson> that the next file name read from the cache is Hans Petter Jansson> bogus, resulting in a bad call to stat(). As "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/URW" is a symlink, I guess this is one of the problems with symlinks in cache files recently fixed by Takashi IWAI <tiwai@suse.de>. The fontconfig packages in Beta3 were unfortunately very broken, please try the updated packages available from ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/projects/m17n/10.1/RPMS Please update both the "fontconfig" and the "fonts-config" packages! As I believe this problem has been fixed, I'm closing this bug as FIXED. Please REOPEN if the problem remains with the updated packages from the above ftp URL.
Just updating CASA to 1.6.284-4 from next-i386 ("stable") was not good enough. Updating "fontconfig" and the "fonts-config" did the trick. Thanks! Now I've the impression, that the fonts of the menu labels are too small (or the label icons are too big). I'll attach a screen shot.
Created attachment 67878 [details] small menu labels
It looks OK to me. The font size is in point while the icons are in pixel, I guess.