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.
>
> You could easily test this by editing ~/.xinitrc to use twm (a
> very simple wm) instead of what you're currently using. If startx
> works after that, then you don't need to fix X, you just need to fix
> your wm.
>
Hm. /root had no .xinitrc. Still, before it made no difference.
I just created /root/.xinitrc and will try.
> 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.
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?
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......
gary
--
Gary Kline [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.thought.org Public service Unix
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