gdm hangs on close
 

I have recently 'made the switch' as it were and im now using debian (etch) full time!
(of course that makes me very sorry for any n00besque things said)

I have fully configured my 9800pro to the way i like it (with fglrx, 8.29.6) but It seems that whenever I try to reboot, gdm crashes and permanently hangs, with a fuzzy, white, completely stationary screen, forcing me to hit reset.

If i change to a console from the X terminal and 'sudo reboot', it reboots fine, but I can see from the terminal that it doesn't actually manage to kill the gdm process. If i try to kill the gdm process manually it doesnt end and if I try to startx after it has supposedly been killed (or not), it starts a new x server on :1 as gdm is still hanging on :0.

I have already tried adding 'AlwaysRestartServer=true' to '/etc/gdm/gdm.conf', which allowed me to at least logout to the login screen (which had previously caused the same error on a number of occasions), but i still get the same problem if I try to restart from the login screen or from when I am logged in.

I have seen evidence of this behaviour here but my problem seems to happen 100% of the time.

My xorg.conf is below.

Thanks for any help :D

Figure out what process is keeping gdm occupied. Kill that and try again, it should now work properly. If it does, check if there are scripts in the /etc/rc0 and /etc/rc6 directories that handle shutting down that application. If not, create those scripts, read the man pages for the application on how it should be terminated. There are plenty HOWTO's on writing scripts (which isn't very difficult once you understand the basics ;)) on the internet.

I've had similar issues with two different Radeon cards using the fglrx drivers. If you don't need every extra bit of performance, I suggest reconfiguring the xorg (with dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg) and switching the video driver to "radeon", which is the open source driver for ATI Radeons.

If this is not an option, I suggest trying different fglrx options in xorg.conf. This is more than likely an issue with the ATI fglrx driver. At least I haven't managed to freeze my system completely with any other display drivers.

thanks for that, in terms of performance i will have to see what i lose if i just use the standard open source drivers, but i will try all of your suggestions.