Nagging X problem

[Nifty Hat Mitch]

On Sat, Sep 25, 2004 at 08:47:17PM -0400, Thomas E. Dukes wrote:
> > On Sat, 2004-09-25 at 12:59, Thomas E. Dukes wrote:
> > > > On Sep 25, 2004 at 13:22, Thomas E. Dukes in a soothing 
> > rage wrote:
> > > > 

> > > > >The video card is a matrox millenium g200.
> > > > 
> > > > I only saw a couple of warnings in there. Since this worked with 

> > > 
> > > Yes it works fine in runlevel 5.  I did a locate for the 2 
> > files you 
> > > mentioned.  I don't have either of those files (anywhere).

> 
> Unfortunately, that didn't work either.  It seems to be the root account
> can't start X manually from runlevel 3 but can login as root under runlevel
> 5.
> 
> It has to be a file somewhere preventing this similar to root not being able

Goodness this is a long thread and still unresolved.

I would:
    mv /root /oldroot
    mkdir /root
    startx
    logout
    # login
    cp /etc/skel/.[a-z]* /root
    startx
    logout
    # login
    startx    

Clean out /tmp including dot files
and reboot.

I would use strace:
  As a user that works

     strace -f -o /tmp/trace-startx-userbob startx

  As root user

     strace -f -o /tmp/trace-startx-rootuser startx

Look at the two trace files to see if something makes sense.
First look at the stat() and open() system calls to see
what different files are involved.

Pam may be involved... were any pam config files tinkered with. 
    ls -ltr /etc/pam.d

Check for old and new rpm config files that need resolution.

    locate rpmnew | grep rpmnew$
    locate rpmsave | grep rpmsave$

Perhaps futile, generate an overwhelming list of Config files:

 (rpm -qa )| while read it; do  rpm -q --configfiles $it; done

Save the list and look at date time stamps of modification and 
look for files and things that you recall touching.

Things like /etc/security/access.conf....



-- 
	T o m  M i t c h e l l 
	Me, I would "Rather" Not.