How to trace Metacity/GDM greeter error?
 

I perfomed an update from Ximian Red Carpet on my RH 8 machine which had been significanly updated already, including running on the latest kernel. I tried to update the critical patches from Red Carpet, but this failed due to dependencies in kdebase-3.1-15 conflicting with lisa-3.0.5a-1
cups-1.1.17-13.3.0.3 conficting with man-pages-fr-0.9-9.

Once this had failed, I noticed that I could no longer open a new app under GNOME. I restarted the machine, and X starts, but the hourglass no longer spins, the animation keeps repeating, and the login greeter never appears.

I can still toggle over to getty-1, 2, etc and use command line. When I do ps -aux, I see the normal list of daemons, but nfsd is listed several times, and does not reflect any tty, just a '?'. Same '?' for XFree86, GDMGreeter, etc. Is this normal?

My problem is I don't know if this is X related, Metacity related, or GNOME related, and don't know how to begin to track this.

Any help will be sincerely appreciated.

Keith Starks

nfsd is the NFS daemon. maybe you have lots of "zombie" processes running. do you see anything unusual if you reboot into single user mode?

u might want to use strace to check some processes running on your system:

strace -p X

where X is the PID of the program from ps.

hth.

Upon further review, I THINK that the nfsd stuff may be normal. I ran the strace on the greeter, since it is not coming up fully, and got the messages below:

poll([fd=3, events=POLLIN|POLLPRI, revents=POLLIN}, {FD=4, EVENTS=POLLIN|POLLPRI]}], 2, -1) = 1
read(3, "\Ngreetpid 14238 2299\n", 4095) = 21
write(6, "A\n", 2) = 2
kill(14238, SIGUSR2) = 0

I really don't know what any of that means, but hopefully someone here does.

Keith Starks