Hi there again!!!

Well, I fix one this, destroy another . Yesterday I could not run any 3D applications, so I fixed it as Nvidia's manual said. Here is my thread:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...threadid=76364

I don't know if it has anything to do with the problem I'm facing today though.
When I try to login (text mode), I cannot login as any user (yes, it's right, whenever I type an user name, it returns me to the login prompt without any error messages), root is fine. When I then login as root and type su <user name> I change to user and I cannot startx, getting this error:

PAM Authentication Failed, cannot start X server
Perhaps you do not have console ownership? giving up.
- xinit: No such file or directory (errno 2): unable to connect to X server
- xinit: No such process (errno 3): server error.

If I switch to Graphical login, root can login, but any other user will crash the screen, bringing up an ugly blue screen with unreadable characters and options /yes/no.

I've tried to add a new user to see if it would fix. It did not...

I've tried google, this forum and some others, but although many have had this exactly same problem, nobody seems to be able fixing it. I'm backing up my stuff... I've the feeling a format is coming though .

Any help would be great. I'm running RedHat 9.0, standard kernel/xfree86 and Nvidia's drivers (I've a Nvidia Geforce 4 MX 440)

Thanks in advance.

P.S: feel free to ask anyfile, I have no idea what PAM is and where to start lookin at it.

Well, I've fixed again... ufa, those 2 last days has been really hard for me and Linux. If someone faces the same problem, check this line at /etc/security

<dri>=/dev/nvidia* /dev/3dfx*

You might need to exclude this line (or ratter setting an "#" to make it a comment, in the case you get a problem later).
That's it. I just need help with one more last thing if somebody is reading this...

How, or better, where are all logs to when I boot and to when I shutdown my machine? It's much easier to fix a boot problem if I knew where it is. Thanks in advance.

Hi

I am facing the same problem and tried to fix it with ur suggestion but after this no user can login except root.

?????

Hi

Are you facing the same problem because of nvidias drivers? because if so, may need to chmod 777 at /dev/nvidia0. Then uncomment the line at

/etc/security

where it stands:

<dri>=/dev/nvidia* /dev/3dfx*

I'm not really sure why this happened, and not sure how I've fixed either... . I did as above and I'll not ever touch pam ever again

Not all logs, but most are in /var/log - /var generally holds that kind of stuff. Don't know anything about the specific issue, but thought I'd answer that piece of it.

More useful stuff:

dmesg | less
man dmesg
man syslogd
less /etc/syslog.conf

And I know I'm missing lots of good stuff.

Thanks digiot!

Pretty useful tip. I did not know any of them actually