Gnome won't start!
 

I'm currently setting up my new desktop for home and I've run into a problem. I installed from a Sid daily image and the install went fine. I immediately installed a "stock" K7-smp kernel and again that went fine.

My plans are to run a root/boot on RAID1 with lilo/initrd so I went through all of the steps necessary to do this using mdadm and the "missing" disk method. Things went fairly well and the RAID1 setup worked. I can boot into the RAID and everything "seems" to be fine.

Once the RAID was setup and working, I proceeded with:

apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade
apt-get x-window-system kde-core gnome-core gnome-themes gdm gdm-themes

This all seemed to go fine... I configured everything and then proceeded to install some other packages.

I then rebooted to "see" my new desktop. The reboot put me in GDM, I logged on and nada... just a blank gray screen with my mouse cursor. No "Gnome" splash screen showing the various things starting... Nothing!!!

I then tried starting KDE from GDM and at least then I get a "little" further! Here is a snipped from the .xsession log:

/etc/gdm/Xsession: Beginning session setup...
Error: Can not create directory "/tmp/kde-rscarroll".
Error: Can not create directory "/tmp/kde-rscarroll81VEHa".
Error: Can not create directory "/tmp/ksocket-rscarroll".
Error: Can not create directory "/tmp/ksocket-rscarrollxUbISa".
startkde: Starting up...
startkde: Running kpersonalizer...
DCOPSERVER: authentication setup failed.
DCOPServer self-test failed.

So I'm wondering if the problem is simply a permissions problem on /tmp? During the conversion to RAID1 I used cpio to copy to the RAID.

mkdir /mnt/tmp
mount /dev/md3 /mnt/tmp
cd /tmp
find . -xdev -print | cpio -dvpm /mnt/tmp

I did this for each partition (changing mount points and directorys of course) but I'm wondering if the conversion somehow "changed" the permissions of /tmp (and maybe other's) or if some Debian security issue is at work. The /tmp folder's permissions are "wrong" in my opinion:

drwxr-xr-x 9 root root 4096 Jul 26 07:06 tmp

Shouldn't they have read/write permissions for users?? (drwxrwxrwt or ???)

Are there other "mount points" that may have incorrect permissions due to my conversion???

Could someone at least post the output of ls -la for / so I can compare?

Thanks in advance for your insight!

Why did you apt-get kde-core and gnome-core? There is a metapackage for both kde and gnome

Try
apt-get install gnome
apt-get install kde

See if that works...

Re: Gnome won't start!
 

That wasn't the problem... The problem was with the permissions on the /tmp folder. Apparently, neither cp nor cpio will copy "sticky" permissions and they have to be set manually.

I had installed kde-core simply because I need the libraries for some applications that I run in gnome. I installed gnome-core because there is a lot of extra stuff that comes with "gnome" that I don't need nor use. Then I just install what I need from there.

Thanks for the reply!