I run Debian Squeeze GNOME for some time now. But recently it stopped booting.
I still can login into single user mode as root and see logs, but when I login as usual or run startx from single user, I have black screen with round cursor (like "waiting" one) and nothing happens after that.
I checked logs and the most interesting from my point of view is in /var/log/gdm3 directory. It ends up with message
What can cause this problem? What could be the cure?

If it helps, some other findings:
when systems hangs, I still can switch to parallel tty and try to login as my user in text mode. Response is:
and I am back to login inviation.

I don't have /etc/X11/xorg.conf file, but I have /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d which lists evdev, wacom and synaptic files. I only have synaptic in my laptop.
When I follow recommendations from Debian wiki page, create new .conf file and try to start X with this conf, I get absolutely black screen, and only Ctrl-C or Ctrl-Alt-F1 help.

Hope for your assistance!
Thanks!

Just to make sure: Did you use the same username in all cases? Was it darkduck? Can you login as root from the other virtual console? What's the output of df in all the cases (single user, before entering "startx", when logged in as root while X login is pending?)

Cheers,

Peter

"darkduck" is my username in the system.
I think I can login as root from different tty's at the same time. But not as darkduck.
I am not at that laptop at the moment, but I am sure partition has enough space. I'd say about 25% of it is in use.

So if you can login as root, you could check, wether /home/darkduck is really gone. If /home is a separate filesystem, you will see by "df" whether it's still mounted. Therefore I was asking for "df". Could use "mount" as well, but my eyes prefer the output of "df".

Cheers,

Peter

/home/darkduck is still here.
/home is on the same partition as /

Check the permissions and ownership of your /home

Kind regards

I have not checked permissions on /home, but /home/darkduck is owned by darkduck.

Repo is right here - if you don't have permissions to access contents of /home, the ownerschip of /home/darkduck does not matter.
On the other hand, as your system worked before, a change of the permmissions is quite unlikely.

Can you check the messages in /var/log/messages /var/log/syslog and /var/log/auth.log (as far as they do exist on your system) that are written while you where trying to login as "darkduck"?

As it seems your X Server died, a look into /var/log/Xorg.0.log (or similar) would be helpfull as well.

OK, now I can get access to my laptop and have some time to solve the issue.

/home is owned by root, as per ls -l /
/home/darkduck is owned by darkduck

df before startx (though GNOME is trying to start in different tty) shows usage of / as 33%. Nothing changes after X -config /root/xorg.conf.new

Here are logs for the particular session:
messages: http://www.darkduck.com/FILES/messages
auth.log: http://www.darkduck.com/FILES/auth.log
syslog: http://www.darkduck.com/FILES/syslog
Xorg.0.log: http://www.darkduck.com/FILES/Xorg.0.log

I obviously tried to find anything useful in it, but without much success.

Hi Darkduck,

thanks for the logs. They confirm indeed, that you do have a permission problem ...
As Permissions usually don't change by themselves ... did I get that right, that the system did work before? Do you remember what was changed before it stopped working?
Do you have any security enhancements running? From the logs, it looks like your kernel is SELinux enabled, but you didn't activate it.

Could you please provide the output of

mount
ls -ld / /home /home/darkduck

What happens if you do a login as root and su to darkduck afterwards? Can you please provide any (error) messages that show up, when you do a

su darkduck
exit
su - darduck

Sorry, it's a bit guesswork from here ;-)

Cheers,

Peter

Quick reply: the last thing I'd done before the problem occured was installation of Pardus Corporate 2 on separate partition. I guess it broke smth, because Debian is not the only victim, but also a Mageia on another partition. But error looks slightly different there.
I'll do the experiments with su later and reply separately.

su darkduck returns
Cannot execute /bin/bash: Permission denied

su - darkduck returns
Unable to cd to '/home/darkduck'

ls -ls / /home /home/darkduck returns
drwxrwx--- 26 root disk 4096 Oct 30 07:44 /
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Sep 24 22:47 /home
drwxr-xr-x 40 darkduck darkduck 4096 Nov 6 00:11 /home/darkduck

mount returns
/dev/sda8 on / type ext3 (rw,errors=remount-ro)
tmpfs on /lib/init/rw type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,mode=0755)
proc on /proc type proc (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
udev on /dev type tmpfs (rw,mode=0755)
tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,noexec,nosuid,gid=5,mode=620)
/dev/sda6 on /mageia type ext3 (rw)
/dev/sda7 on /kubuntu type ext3 (rw)
/dev/sda1 on /windows type fuseblk (rw,allow_other,blksize=4096)
fusectl on /sys/fs/fuse/connections type fusectl (rw)


How did you figure out that this is permissions issue? Would appreciate if you show me the place where you found it.

Hi,

I believe the command

chmod o+rx /

will cure your system. You should be able to log in als darkduck on the text console right afterwards. If /etc/init.d/gdm exists, a

/etc/init.d/gdm restart

should enable the graphic X login as well. If not, I suggest a reboot.

I will give some more explanation as soon as my time permits.

Hope to hear a success message in the meantime ;-)

Cheers

1 members found this post helpful.