[arch-general] latest updates broke kde3, kde4, twm & console login ability

David C. Rankin drankinatty at suddenlinkmail.com
Tue Jul 14 03:43:24 EDT 2009


Listmates,

	Here is a rather strange one. On a dell gx280 box (Intel graphics) that had been running both kdemod3 and kde4.3 beta 2 just brilliantly, I am now left without any way to log in from the console. All was great until updates earlier today.

	What happens is -- the box boot fine and will bring up the kdm login/chooser display just fine. If kdm (from testing) is being used, then after supplying your user/pass all appears like it is going to start as usual. The Air theme is presented and the first little icon (I think it is a hard drive) fades in like usual. Then all of a sudden <BOOM> &%$ {BAM} !#$ <CRASH!!>, the screen goes black flickers slightly and then kdm restarts. (you could do this over-and-over all night)

	The weird thing is that you CANNOT even choose "console login" to drop to text mode. Pretty much the same sequence plays out here to. After supplying your user/pass all appears like it is going to drop you to the text console, then the screen goes black and kdm restarts and you are left right back where you started -- Huh??

	Another bit of weirdness. When I edit my gurb config to tell it to just start in runlevel3 be adding a "3" at the end of the boot like, the boot process seems to ignore this. You see the "Entering Runlevel 3" line go by during boot, but then <WHACK> kdm starts and you are back at the beginning of the loop staring at the kdm greeter knowing this trick isn't going to work (Kinda reminds me of Groundhod Day -- the movie -- you remember)

	So I have tried a pacman -Syu and loaded another 30 meg of packages, but none looking like they would solve the problem (and they didn't)

	Now I'm kinda at a loss What gives? What to check? But, how do I recover? (I still have full ssh access to the box, so fixing it won't be a problem once I can figure out what I'm looking for and how to fix it. Any help would be greatly appreciate it.


-- 
David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E.
Rankin Law Firm, PLLC
510 Ochiltree Street
Nacogdoches, Texas 75961
Telephone: (936) 715-9333
Facsimile: (936) 715-9339
www.rankinlawfirm.com


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