[geeks] Gnome and KDE hang on login...

[Will Mc Donald]

Any of you guys familiar with Gnome's startup scripts on linux? I'm having
problems with a new box I just built, here's the body of a message I posted to
redhat-list...

> I don't know if this belongs on the Vallhalla or Xfree86 lists but figured
this'd be a good place to start.
>
> I've just installed Redhat 7.3 on a new Athlon Thunderbird on an Asus
A7N266-VM board, with onboard Geforce 2MX, LAN etc. I've managed to get RH
installed and booting fine, now X is giving me trouble.
>
> I've followed the instructions to install the appropriate Nvidia drivers
from RPMs...
>
> NVIDIA_nforce-1.0-0246.rh73up_2.4.18_3
> NVIDIA_kernel-1.0-3123.rh73up
> NVIDIA_GLX-1.0-3123
>
> and edited XF86Config-4 accordingly. Running startx initialises X and then I
get the RH spash screen saying it's starting the various GNOME services, then
this vanishes, I get the grey taskbar and the box hangs and has to be hard
reset.
>
> Running prefdm and trying to login to a KDE session does the same thing. If
I login using Failsafe (TWM?) though, that's fine, implying that X itself
isn't the problem, it's something GNOME/KDE specific. I see the same problem
wether running at 1600x1200x24bit or 640x480x8bit.
>
> I seem to remember seeing a post somewhere when I was searching for the
solution to a problem with grub throwing "error 28"s (resolved by just
sticking with LILO) that someone else had experienced similar X problems and
traced the errors to KDE/GNOME running some startup sripts/apps that tried to
do something power management related. I've had a look but I can't see
anything obvious.
>
> Can anyone point me in the right direction?

I've subsequently managed to get KDE sorted, it was, as I'd read somewhere,
some sort of APM probe while the Windowing systems startup. There's a laptop
APM section in /usr/bin/startkde...

# if [ ! -e "$HOME"/.kde/share/config/kcmlaptoprc -a -e /proc/apm ]; then
#  # Try to figure out if we're on a laptop
#  if ! /bin/cat /proc/apm |grep -q "?"; then
    # We appear to be on a laptop with battery status notification
#    cat >"$HOME"/.kde/share/config/kcmlaptoprc <<EOF
#[BatteryDefault]
#Enable=true
#EOF
#  fi
#fi

And commenting that out allowed KDE to start succesfully. Now to fine the
Gnome equivalent, I'm not sure if what I'm looking for is Sawfish/Window Maker
specific or Gnome or what. Any one got any clues?

Cheers,

Will.