relatively urgent question (about X)
Bill Moran
wmoran at potentialtech.com
Fri May 21 15:05:07 PDT 2004
Gary Kline wrote:
> On Fri, May 21, 2004 at 02:22:46PM -0400, Bill Moran wrote:
>
>>Gary Kline wrote:
>>
>>> For some months I've had increasing troubles with my
>>> 4.9/4.10 abruptly crashing. This morning I found my
>>> workhorse server, tao, down and hung up while trying to
>>> fsck /usr. I cleaned everything thoroughly and then
>>> started xdm. The grey screen showed, the mouse was frozen;
>>> after 30 seconds, BOOM. Another crash. After yet
>>> another round of fsck's, I tried startx. To see what
>>> errs might kill the X11 boot. No: same blank grey screen,
>>> same frozen mouse,same OS crash.
>>>
>>> I tried /stand/sysinstall to reconfigure X. No luck.
>>> I'm now doing my next stable sup upgrade and am doing
>>> yet another buildworld && buildkernel.
>>>
>>> I doubt this will resolve the X Window snafu, tho. So:::
>>> what x11/*XFree* ports do I have to fetch/build/install??
>>> ((I'm assuming the reason for the crash was X-related,
>>> but this is only a first-SWAG.) Also, if anybody has had a
>>> similar problem, please let me know.
>>
>>I'm just speculating, but it sounds like it's your window manager
>>that's not starting, although X seems to actually be working.
>
> When I just tried X with startx (as root), I always got
> the defaukolt twm. Here is what in root's .xsession::
>
> twm &
> xterm &
> xterm &
>
> I'm using ctwm in my /home/kline acct. Pretty basic.
Perhaps my speculation is wrong, then ... it just sounded like a wm
problem from your description.
>>In my experience, big, complex wms like Gnome and KDE tend to have
>>trouble off and on. I've found that deleting everything from /tmp
>>will sometimes fix things. Other times, I've been able to get things
>>going again by deleting the .gnome (and other, similar directories)
>>from my home directory. Note that this second one blows away all your
>>Gnome settings.
>
> I'm test gnome and kde3 on my new 5.2 server; it's temp'y
> offline. There are lots of GUI-goodies in these wmanagers
> but my bias is to 'keep it simple, sir'. ctwm along with
> lots of tuning has served for around 7 years... .
>
> Snce my mouse "X" was frozen, maybe the mouse daemon never
> exec'd. Could that have crashed the OS? Another strange
> new fault is that rc.network took a long time to do anything.
Yeah, that doesn't sound like a wm.
> This line:
>
> May 21 09:55:17 tao /kernel: Doing initial network setup:
>
> hung more than a minute. Do you//does anybody have a clue
> re this new problem?
In /etc/rc.network, the first thing that happens after that message
is printed is the hostname is set if not already set. I wonder if
there's some reason the hostname command could be taking a long time
if there's no hostname set yet?
> Anyway, thanks for your data-points. I'll summarize to
> the list if/when I figure out what's going oon. I've had
> lots of strange events, but this is a new one......
Good luck.
--
Bill Moran
Potential Technologies
http://www.potentialtech.com
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