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 _______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"