I just started my Mandrake 10 system up and the usual user selection window appeared after the OS loaded up. When I tried to login to my usual Gnome session the screen went black for a second, then blue, then I was returned to the user login selection window. Tried a couple times after restarting the PC with the same result, it won't let me in. I could log in as root OK. I tried to login as a non-root user again but this time selected to login to a KDE session. This also failed. I got the error message;

"The following installation problem was detected while trying to start KDE -
No write access to "/home/adunkin/.ICE authority"
KDE is unable to start"

I then tried again but selected IceWM as the session type, this worked (thus I can ask this question here).

What has gone wrong? I seem to have suffered some sort of spontaneous meltdown in my Mandrake 10 system which has worked perfectly for months before this problem.

Change the permission of the directory
/home/adunkin
to adunkin

Probably some files in adunkin home directory are having root permission and the user is not able to access those files.

Cheers
Z

The permissions have never been altered but I checked them anyway. They are all OK. I still cannot log into Gnome or KDE sessions. It is weird because root and other users can still log into Gnome and KDE sessions as they always have been able to. A gremlin has crept into my user profile somewhere. Is there a way of repairing the damage that has mysteriously appeared?

I have also started receiving the following error message when launching applications under my saviour IceWM session quite a bit.

There was an error setting up inter-process communications for KDE. The message returned by the system was:
"Could not read network connection list.
/home/adunkin/.DCOPserver_localhost_0
Please check that the "dcopserver" program is running.


When I go into a terminal and try to run dcopserver I get the following;

[adunkin@localhost adunkin]$ dcopserver
/usr/X11R6/bin//iceauth: /home/adunkin/.ICEauthority not writable, changes will be ignored
DCOPClient::attachInternal. Attach failed Authentication Rejected, reason : None of the authentication protocols specified are supported and host-based authentication failed
ICE Connection rejected!

DCOPClient::attachInternal. Attach failed Authentication Rejected, reason : None of the authentication protocols specified are supported and host-based authentication failed
DCOPServer self-test failed.
ICE Connection rejected!

iceauth: timeout in locking authority file /home/adunkin/.ICEauthority
[adunkin@localhost adunkin]$

It seems ICE and DCOPserver are related as I have seen both of these terms in error messages lately and my suspicion is that my login death is related to these problems. I really have no idea what it all means.
Hope this assists anyone in helping to solve my problems.

Can you try the following

Remove all DCOP sockets from your home directory.

rm .DCOP*

Be careful not to delete any of your files.

Change the permission of .ICEauthority to 777 .You can change it to 600 after it works

Check the tmp dir

Change the permission of dirs like
ksocket-adunkin
orbit-adunkin
mcop-adunkin
dcop-adunkin

to adunkin:adunkin
[Or you can move all these directories to some other tmp dir]

Now try to login as adunkin
Hope this will work

Cheers
Z

Thank you very much zulfilee. It appears you have solved my problem.

There were no .DCOP files in my home directory so the
rm .DCOP*
command did not do anything.

However logging in as root and changing the permissions of /home/adunkin/.ICEauthority to 777 did the trick.
I noticed that when I then logged as adunkin under Gnome and checked these permissions they were of course still set at 777. However I then ran KPPP and after doing this the permissions had changed to 600 automatically and DCOPserver files had appeared in my home directory. Not sure what is going on or why my problems occurred (I am a little curious) but the main thing is my system seems cured. What exactly happened is beyond me but I am extremely grateful for your help zulfilee.

You are obviously quite switched on zulfilee, so I'll stretch the friendship a little and ask;
"How do I maintain connection to my ISP between user logins under Mandrake 10"?
I recall that when using Redhat 7.2 and logging a user out, any active connection to the internet was maintained. When the next user logged in the connection was still active (reducing phone bills). Since using Mandrake 10 I have noticed when a user logs out the internet connection is killed and the next user has to dial up again. Any hints?

Thats a bit wierd but you can always run kppp with nohup

Try

nohup kppp

Nohup will make the command run in background even if the user or the terminal is logged off.

But I dont know any other way of keeing the connection alive

Cheers
Z

Note: When you run any KDE[Like kppp etc] application from Gnome Desktop, DCOP server is initialized and all the changes you observed happens.

I executed kppp from terminal with nohup, ie;
$ nohup kppp

kppp launched, but again connection did not remain between logins??

Hi,

I saw this in my kppp [Am using FC3 ]

There`s an option called configure in kppp and it has a tab by name Misc
There I have this option called disconnect on Xserver shutdown
Just turning off that option worked for me.


Cheers
Z

Thanks, I'll give it a try.

I tried that kppp config option but it made no difference, connection still terminated when I logged out.