On Sun, 10 Sep 2017 19:43:04 +0300 Erkki Ruohtula <[email protected]> wrote: > I did a fresh installation with NetBSD-7.1-amd64.iso in VirtualBox > 5.1.26, mostly using defaults. I did enable xdm in the installer. > Everything appeared to go smoothly, and the system now starts nicely > X11, and shows the xdm login screen. The problem is I cannot get > past that. If I enter the username root and its correct > password, I get a dialog box labeled "Session Menu", > with text "chooseSessionListWidget" and buttons under it, > of which most are grayed except "Default/Fail Safe" and "Cancel". > > I thought "Default/Fail Safe" would be the obvious choice, but if > I hit it, I get a black screen, except for the console log window > in lower right-hand corner. X11 seems to be still running, but > it is impossible to do anything except reset the (virtual) machine. > Is the fail safe configuration missing? Should something > special be chosen in the installer? (in other X11 installations > I have seen it usually consist of starting twm and a xterm window).
I did some digging by enabling ssh and logging in. Apparently the way NetBSD sets up xdm, it starts up /usr/X11R7/bin/xsm if the user's directory does not contain .xsession. In my case it was running: USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT STARTED TIME COMMAND erkki 73 0.0 0.4 45440 4152 ? Is 6:08PM 0:00.04 /usr/X11R7/bin/xsm In the absence of per user configuration, xsm should start the programs listed in a default file /etc/X11/xsm/system.xsm which contains twm smproxy xterm but apparently it fails to do so. (All these programs do exist in the installation). The user's .xsession-errors contains only _IceTransmkdir: ERROR: euid != 0,directory /tmp/.ICE-unix will not be created. However, that directory did exist, and contains the subdirectory srwxrwxrwx 1 erkki wheel 0 Sep 17 18:08 /tmp/.ICE-unix/73 According to "top", xsm is in state "select", which I guess means it is stuck waiting on some descriptors. Next I tried if an X11 session can be obtained in the old way without xsm: I added a minimal .xsession with the lines twm & xterm and restarted the system. This worked as expected: I got a twm session. So xsm seems to have some bug, which has the effect that currently asking the installer to enable xdm results in a system where the user cannot log in at the console. Erkki
