Corrupted Gnome?
 

Hi,

I'm running redhat 8, kernel 2.4.20-28.8smp, and just recently I found that I was unable to log in via the GUI. What would happen is I would enter my username and password, then hit return. Then the Linux Redhat box would show up in the middle of the screen, and that's it. Instead of the little icons appearing under the words "Red Hat' nothing would happen and the machine would just sit there until I either killed the login processes started by me or rebooted the machine. I could ssh to the machine with no problems, and if I killed the GUI log in, I could log in text mode, also with no problems. Eventually I tried switching to a different season, I believe from Gnome to KDE, and I was able to log in just fine. This leads me to believe that some of my Gnome files are corrupted. I believe that if I delete

~/.gnome

I can reset my Gnome preferences. Here's my question (sorry for all the background). This problem didn't just occur to me, it occured to multiple users. All the users log in via a LDAP server, but as I mention it was not an authentication problem, but something with the Gnome session GUI. Is it possible that multiple ~/.gnome directories were corrupted at the same time? Or is there a global Gnome preference directory that might have gotten corrupted and caused this problem? Thanks so much for all you help.


-NifflerX

"Is it possible that multiple ~/.gnome directories were corrupted at the same time?"

Extremely unlikely.

"Or is there a global Gnome preference directory that might have gotten corrupted and caused this problem?"

The problem is not in Gnome per se. It is in gdm which is the Gnome version of the GUI login manager. I would start by looking in these files for something suspicious:

/etc/X11/gdm/gdm.conf
/etc/pam.d/gdm

But I am vague as to exactly what could be wrong.

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Steve Stites

Thanks for your reply. I've checked in /etc/X11/gdm and /etc/X11/gdm/gdm.conf and I've compared them both to the same files on a different machine. I didn't see any differences, so I don't think there was anything suspicious. However, I am certainly no expert so it's easily possible for something to be suspicious and I would miss it. I was thinking that I could replace the /etc/X11/gdm/gdm.conf file with one from a working machine and see if that works, but I'm open to any suggestions as to what might have caused the problem, or a better way to go about fixing it. Thanks so much.



-NifflerX

"I'm open to any suggestions as to what might have caused the problem, or a better way to go about fixing it."

You can look for other gdm files with:

find /etc -iname "*gdm*"

find /usr -iname "*gdm*"

Check the lists against a working machine. You may be missing an entrie gdm file.

gdm calls some pam routines. These same routines are also called by command line login so I think that the problem is probably in gdm, not pam.

If all else fails you might try installing kdm. However installing kdm is probably more of a hassle than fixing gdm.

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Steve Stites