I am trying to set up a diskless workstation (to centralize maintainance) but am having problems getting X sessions to work.
The system boots (from a floppy, then mounts root and /usr seperately over nfs), and I can login and work from a text console. The xdm login appears, but when I log in, something goes wrong. Sometimes I am logged right back out (auth.log shows pam_unix logging me in and out within a few seconds, and I can't find any log messages in between). Sometimes gnome begins to load, but then it dies with a message that "x-session-manager crashed". Graphical login works fine on the system that I used as a template, and I have only made trivial changes to /etc (hostname, fstab). Is there someone out (perhaps with diskless X experience) who can give me a hint on how I need to change the gnome or X or sawfish configuration to work disklessly? The fact that the behaviour is not entirely reproducable also makes me suspect that running without swap might be a problem. Memory shouldn't be a problem -- this machine has 1 GB and I'm barely working it -- but is there some stuff one needs swap for anyway? Is there perhaps some kernel compile flag that disables swap attempts completely?
