X won't stay up
 

I'm running Mdk 9.1 on an HP Pavilion with a PIII @ 450 Mhz and 128M ram, ATI video card, 2 HDs one 10 gig with Linux, the other 12 gig with Win98. Its a stock 9.1 installation. No customizations and I'm running KDE for my WM. I also run with runlevel 3 so I can get into the command line. I've been running 9.1 for several months now without problem. Couple of weeks ago I installed Sylpheed-Claws 0.9.5. When I installed it I also installed a couple of plugins. One of these plugins was the Trayicon which is supposed to put an icon on the kicker/taskbar. Its had some problems in that sometimes it doesn't put the icon in the kicker, it puts it in the desktop but leaves a space for it in the kicker. Over the past couple of days it was getting worse. I'd launch Sylpheed in the morning and it'd leave a space for the icon, but it'd appear in the desktop. When I shutdown Sylpheed, it wouldn't reclaim the space. So the next time there'd be yet another space for the icon, but no icon. Yesterday I decided to reclaim the space by exiting out of KDE and X windows and then restarting by simply saying "startx". I issue "startx" and the screen goes blank for second, then flashes blue which is the default color I'm using then goes back to black then returns to the command line and says nothing more than "Waiting for X server to shutdown". I tried a couple of things to get it up and running again, but wasn't successful. I then su'ed and went into X that way. Cringing the whole time, considering I'm running this as root. I pull in my Sylpheed setup in order to fire off a message to a mailing list asking what is wrong with my X setup, but I didn't load the trayicon plugin though. I thought of a couple of other things I could try and I shutdown X and reverted back to my user login and tried it. It didn't work and I then went back to root and attempted to get back into KDE. I had the same thing happen to me that just happened in my user login. I've setup an alternate user account and I'm able to get into KDE from this alternate. I'm still using Sylpheed, but I'm not using my original user configuration.

I apologize for being so long winded but I'm trying to be complete with this. So what is wrong and how can I fix it?

Tom Williams

can you get kde started again if you remove folder/file .kde and .kderc in your home directory (and /root for root)? You will lose all kde customizations so you'll want to backup so you can restore a few things manually.

I already thought of that. That was one of the things I tried. I renamed the folder to KDE. I suppose it might not be a bad idea to completely rename it to something else, but when I tried that it didn't help and it didn't create another .kde folder.

It has to do with that combination of your ATI card and Motherboard. I have run into this problem before. This problem keep popping up with the ATI cards ONLY. Because their is very very poor support from ATI for Linux. What I ended up doing was changing to NVIDIA

Unfortunately, that's not an option. The video is part of the motherboard and I don't have the money at the moment to either get another video card or replace the motherboard. What I don't understand is that I'm running X right now, as another user. If it was the video card, then why does it work as a different user?

how about cleaning out the whole user folder except .bashrc and .bash_profile? (move all the files somewhere else entirely).

1. What exact model of ATi video card do you have?
2. What do you see if you check the file /var/log/XFree86.0.log?

To me it looks more like an XF86Config problem than anything else. Although it could be related to an X termination command somewhere in your whole X interface (and KDE) start up scripts.

This problem has been reported fixed im MDK9.2 soon to be released.

OK to answer some of these questions and things. First off, MCC says that its an ATI Mach64 Utah. I've had this thing so long I don't know where the docs for it are. The HP site usually isn't very helpful when it comes to specifics on hardware.

As for the log: I don't see any serious errors outside of something about not using default mode and then a screen size. There's a long list but its a lot of different screen sizes and there's one of 4 messages in parentheses:
1). vrefresh out of range
2). hsync out of range
3). insufficient memory for mode - makes sense it was for some very large screen sizes.
4). bad mode clock/interlace/doublescan
I got the impression that this wasn't necessarily a bad thing its just trying a number of combinations of screens and figuring out which ones work and which don't. Am I correct about this?

Finally the last message about the problem being fixed in 9.2. If that is the case then is there a fix or workaround for 9.1? I'm comfortable with my setup and I don't really want to upgrade unless there's a way to do it easily without blowing away my user setup.

This is an issue of XFree more than a Mandrake-only problem, what does it come up if you type this:
Just to list the errors, not the warnings (WW) or the informative messages (II)?

It doesn't find any errors.

Tom Williams

Open up the XF86Config file and check the vsync and hsync values to match those of your monitor at your selected resolution(s)

I'm using the "generic" setting for a monitor and I haven't been able to find a configuration for it. The name on the front says CTX. Its a 17" (I think) and it has speakers built in. I got it real cheap somewhere and I didn't get any docs for it. Any way of finding out this information? Perhaps something on the back maybe?

Also, as a thought, is there a way to bring up the video configuration without being in X? I know it can be done through the installer, but like I said I don't want to blow away my setup just to fix this, unless I absolutely have to.

Tom Williams

use
XFdrake
from the command line (you have to be root). It gives you the text version of the configuration program.

It is a bug in XFree re respawning X and ATI graphics cards. Here's a link that links to a patch with instructions on installation:

http://www.zebulon.org.uk/xcrashati_en.html

I went to the link listed. Downloaded the rpm. I got a dependency problem that it wasn't using XFree-4.3-6... So I went to the updates directory and found a XFree-4.3-8.1 both XFree and XFree-server. Downloaded them, installed them, doesn't fix it. What's worse, the alternate user setup that was working stopped. I have a third user setup and it still does work.

With the link, there was a discussion as well. There was mention of forcing the server to restart. But there was no mention of KDM. Is there a way to set this in KDM? The bigger question is, will this help? I know, it doesn't hurt to try.

Tom Williams

OK, I don't get this, but it worked. I decided to take one of the throw-away accounts and play with it to see if I could get it to work. I first tried deleting .kde folder. Didn't help. Then just on a whim I deleted a file named .xinitrc It worked. The second user account would then startup in X. So, I took my main account and did the same thing. Coincidently the file was 0 bytes. I deleted it, it now works. What is the .xinitrc file supposed have in it? If its 0 length that would explain why it doesn't start up. What it doesn't explain is how it got like that.

I haven't tried doing that with root, but I suspect it'll work the same in it. thanks for the help.

~/.xinitrc - X uses this file when you type startx from a text-mode login

I knew that. What I didn't know was that if its 0 length it wouldn't allow X to startup. For that matter, is there a bug that made it go 0 length?

It's just a bash script, like a text file but executable. Mine's about 200 bytes. It just calls a lot of other scripts that start X from what I can see. If it's empty, nothing is going to happen. As to it getting zeroed out, I would suspect your unsuccessful attempt to install the ati patch or the install of the new XFree. You need root privileges to write to it so some process running with root privileges did it.