[Pkg-xfce-devel] Debian testing installs with XDM as dependency of Xfce fail (eventually) when switched to LightDM

[Gilbert Sullivan]

On 09/09/2011 01:09 PM, Yves-Alexis Perez wrote:
> On ven., 2011-09-09 at 12:58 -0400, Gilbert Sullivan wrote:
>> It appears that this line --
>>
>> co:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty hvc0 9600 linux
>>
>> -- in /etc/inittab of the AMD64 system was causing those errors.
>> Apparently the line is placed there during installation on a
>> hypervisor-capable system. Once I commented that line out, the
>> respawning errors ceased completely.
>
> That might deserve a bug report to the debian installer or to the
> relevant package.
>
>> I think its obvious that those errors weren't directly related to the
>> cause of the user profiles losing the ability to log on under LightDM.
>> I
>> have no idea whether or not they could have contributed to the
>> problem.
>>
>> Many thanks for your consideration. When I make future attempts to
>> communicate about issues I'll try to be better organized.
>
> You're welcome, it was indeed a tricky issue.
>
> Regards,

Oops! I spoke too soon! LightDM decided to stop letting me log on again 
tonight.

As I have seen on three separate occasions before on this particular 
system, the T520i, the system hard-locked. No response whatsoever to 
keyboard or to mouse.

I forced the system down by holding the power button depressed. When I 
restarted the system I was presented with the normal LightDM login 
prompt, but an attempt to log in resulted in the background staying on 
the greeter background instead of proceeding to the selected background, 
and the cursor presented was the "X" cursor. No interaction with a 
desktop session was possible, other than to switch to one of the 
terminals. I went to tty1, logged in, and gathered the contents of 
dmesg, syslog, .xsession-errors, and lightdm.log.

This time I did not remove LightDM. I simply installed XDM, rebooted, 
and logged on so that I could send this message with the appropriate 
attachments. I hope that they will be of some use, and I'll avoid 
removing LightDM so that I can try any experiments / data gathering that 
you might suggest.

It did take rather longer this time to see this problem appear. The 
previous installations of LightDM resulted in this problem appearing in 
less than two days -- and that was three times in a row.

Well, I've got to hit the sack. This happened just as I was trying to do 
backups to external drives and my second system. I'll be back tomorrow 
morning (New York time).
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