Red Hat 9 hangs on Gnome logout
 

Hi,

I'm not the newest linux user on the block, but I'm not a sysadmin either. I just upgraded my RH8 to RH9 (see system details below). I'm having an intermittent problem with logging out of some accounts on my machine. I use Gnome and haven't had the problem in my user account, but more alarmingly it shows up in my root account. There are a couple other accounts on the machine and it has happened to one of them as well. I have googled on the subject and searched the RH site for info with no success. It goes like this:

I select logout from the menu and ... nothing happens. The computer isn't frozen. I can still open the Start Here icon on the desktop and run programs. A right click on the desktop still gives me a working pop-up menu. I can ctrl-alt-F1 and get to a text screen and back again. I just can't use anything on the panel at the bottom of the screen as it is locked up. So far the only thing I can think of to do is open a terminal window and reboot. A tad irritating.

When I finally get back to the GDM, if I login to the same account that just froze up, it will do it again unless I login to a different window manager. Then it will logout just fine and I can log into Gnome and logout like normal. Eventually, it will come back again, but I can't really predict it.

One last piece of info: In my personal account (which hasn't had this problem) I have the panel at the top of the screen, but haven't moved it there in the other accounts as I am not there very often and so have not tweaked them the way I like. I have not tried moving the panel in those other accounts because a) it is unpredictable, I don't use them much, and so it might be a long time before I can assess whether that was the problem, b) I can't imagine that the placement of the panel would cause the logout option to lock up the panel, and c) there is something about me that would find that solution a tad unsatisfying as it doesn't really fix the problem, just avoids it.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

All the best,

Any errors in the (system) logs?
And if you run the "logout" app/script from an xterm?

Hi,

Thanks for your reply. Here is my newbieness coming out. I didn't think to look at the system logs. The next time it happens I will.

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"And if you run the "logout" app/script from an xterm?"
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I'm not too sure what this means. I'm guessing it is a way to invoke the logout command, but I'm not sure what exactly to type in the xterm. :confused:

Thanks for your help. I'll post the relevant sys-log stuff when it happens again.

All the best,

This is a known problem, related to misbehaving apps breaking the X session management protocol. XMMS apparently can cause difficulty:

see, https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla...g.cgi?id=79829

basic fix is to remove XMMS from the session management system.

RH 9 hangs on logout--culprit=modprobe: Can't locate module sound-service-0-3
 

Hi,

Thanks for your help. I've solved the problem, in a way that I didn't expect, so I'll post it here. It won't be too surprising to learn that it was a SUE (Stupid User Error).

I first checked the RH bugzilla link that mhearn suggested, but it didn't really seem to describe the problem I was having (I did have that problem occasionally with RH8). XMMS does seem to be involved with that, but it has also been reported from systems that weren't using it which is my situation.

In any case, the system logs ended up not helping me too much about the logout problem. Here is a sample listing of the sys-log when I would try to log out and the panel would hang:

At 8:32 I told it to logout, and at 8:35 opened an xterm and told it to reboot. It then goes through the reboot sequence properly.

Jul 9 08:31:11 localhost gdm(pam_unix)[904]: session opened for user root by (uid=0)
Jul 9 08:31:11 localhost gconfd (root-1141): starting (version 2.2.0), pid 1141 user 'root'
Jul 9 08:31:12 localhost gconfd (root-1141): Resolved address "xml:readonly:/etc/gconf/gconf.xml.mandatory" to a read-only config source at position 0
Jul 9 08:31:12 localhost gconfd (root-1141): Resolved address "xml:readwrite:/root/.gconf" to a writable config source at position 1
Jul 9 08:31:12 localhost gconfd (root-1141): Resolved address "xml:readonly:/etc/gconf/gconf.xml.defaults" to a read-only config source at position 2
Jul 9 08:35:12 localhost shutdown: shutting down for system reboot

Just to note, I did wait to see if it would eventually logout. I let it sit over night last night to find it in the same place in the morning.

However, I was having another hang problem that was even worse (although I thought unrelated). Without warning some programs would just quit and lockup the X-session so that I would also have to reboot. For a while I thought this was because I chose to upgrade RH8 to RH9 rather than do a clean install and that something hadn't been upgraded correctly. Then, as per unSpawn's instructions, I checked the sys logs and this is what I found:

Jul 10 08:09:49 localhost gdm(pam_unix)[904]: session opened for user urbanotter by (uid=0)
Jul 10 08:09:50 localhost gconfd (urbanotter-996): starting (version 2.2.0), pid 996 user 'urbanotter'
Jul 10 08:09:50 localhost gconfd (urbanotter-996): Resolved address "xml:readonly:/etc/gconf/gconf.xml.mandatory" to a read-only config source at position 0
Jul 10 08:09:50 localhost gconfd (urbanotter-996): Resolved address "xml:readwrite:/home/urbanotter/.gconf" to a writable config source at position 1
Jul 10 08:09:50 localhost gconfd (urbanotter-996): Resolved address "xml:readonly:/etc/gconf/gconf.xml.defaults" to a read-only config source at position 2
Jul 10 08:09:51 localhost kernel: Via 686a/8233/8235 audio driver 1.9.1-ac2
Jul 10 08:09:51 localhost kernel: PCI: Found IRQ 4 for device 00:11.5
Jul 10 08:09:51 localhost kernel: IRQ routing conflict for 00:11.5, have irq 9, want irq 4
Jul 10 08:09:51 localhost kernel: via82cxxx: Six channel audio available
Jul 10 08:09:51 localhost kernel: ac97_codec: AC97 Audio codec, id: ALG32 (ALC650)
Jul 10 08:09:51 localhost kernel: via82cxxx: board #1 at 0xE000, IRQ 9
Jul 10 08:09:51 localhost modprobe: modprobe: Can't locate module sound-service-0-3
Jul 10 08:14:42 localhost login(pam_unix)[853]: session opened for user urbanotter by LOGIN(uid=0)
Jul 10 08:14:42 localhost -- urbanotter[853]: LOGIN ON tty1 BY urbanotter
Jul 10 08:14:45 localhost shutdown: shutting down for system reboot

So it was having trouble with the sound module. Here is where SUE comes in. When I upgraded to RH9 I remembered to re-install/upgrade the video driver, but forgot to do the same with the ALSA drivers. Ooops.

Just an aside for anyone with the same hardware, I had trouble making sense of the ALSA instructions for adding the "options" for the sound card in the /etc/modules.conf. I'm sure they make sense if you know more than me, but they didn't help me much. So, I used the option lines that I had used when I first installed the ALSA drivers in RH8 and they worked fine. Here they are:

options snd-via82xx index=0 id="VIA"
options snd major=116 cards_limit=1

I had gotten these from an example module.conf file I downloaded from ASUS. I don't know what they do, but putting them in there today took me from an unstable to a stable system. No more random crashes and I can logout of any account without any problems. Very happy.

Lastly, ALSA didn't give instructions (or else I missed them) on how to have your mixer settings saved rather than reset when the box is shutdown. I added these lines to the modules.conf to fix that:

post-install snd-via82xx /bin/aumix-minimal -f /etc/.aumixrc -L >/dev/null 2>&1 || :
pre-remove snd-via82xx /bin/aumix-minimal -f /etc/.aumixrc -S >/dev/null 2>&1 || :

I modified them from this posting:

http://www.redhat.com/archives/sound.../msg00007.html

Thanks for your help and suggestions. I hope this can help someone else in a similar boat.

All the best,

Brad