Xandros serious login problem

[Calum]

i have justinstalled xandros as the main OS on the laptop. it looks excellent but i have one SERIOUS issue with it. i can ONLY log in as administrator (root).

the default login is a modified version of kdm, you selectthe user from a list, then type the password in as usual, seemingly the GUI is the only modification. when i choose any user other than root, i get a black screen for a second or two, the cursor changes to that "working" watch icon for a split second then, i get the login box again. if i login as root, i get the full kde desktop as normal.

to test it i have tried doing chown and chgrp -R so the users' home dirs are owned by them (although this was already the case, and i would have thought i would get some kdm error box if this was the problem), i have tried chmodding my home dir to 777, no change, i have tried using Xandros' 'switch user' thing, which allows you to open up another X login session without logging out of X, i get the same issue, the switch user thing starts up the login box, same problem until i switch the user back to root again.

is there anything i can do about this do you think? can i edit some file? read some log to find out possible causes? it seems incredibly odd that it works perfectly with root but not a user.

/home is on a seperate partition incidentally, and /root is not, will this matter?

if i don't sort this i will have to install a distro that does not have this problem, which would be a real shame. i already ditched Vectorlinux even though it looked excellent simply because the default X installation was so crap. it didn't support half of the options in my old mandrake XF86Config, and wouldn't let me use an X running runlevel, or use a display manager etc.

i haven't found this issue on the web, but then Xandros is not a hugely popular distro, still you;d think this problem would be noticed very quickly by anybody who had it.

This installation of Xandros is Xandros Desktop OS 2.0, it is the first 'real' release, ie not the beta (although it could just be the renamed beta for all i know) and it's the free beer version, not the fifty bucks version. it came as an ISO in the february issue of linux magazine, so i suppose i am off to their forums next, although as i said linuxquestions and xandros.com yielded no help.

thanks for thoughts in advance.

[Tux]

How is /home mounted?

[Void Main]

That is really odd that you would have that serious of a problem right out of the gate. And I've heard good things about Xandros. It does sound like it could be a permissions problem as you also thought but it could be some other problem that causes the window manager not to start up. Usually you will find these errors in the .xsession-errors file in the user's home directory as to what went wrong. Another option is to bring the distro down into runlevel 3 (or whatever runlevel Xandros uses to not start KDM on startup). Then log in as the user you are having trouble with and do a "startx". You might catch some more errors that way.

[Calum]

well i justtried to switch to runlevel 3, then 2, and hey presto X is still running, so not much use there, hang on because fstab is a total shambles (GUI distro), so wait till i see what goes on./home seems to only have "rw" in its mount options (does not have "default", so let me add that and remount.

[Calum]

ok, i added 'default' to the /home line, it didn't change anything, so i umounted /home, created and chmodded the necessary user dirs within the actual /home directory (not mounted, but on the root partition), and tried again. i can now login. here for reference is my original (installer generated) fstab file for a laugh:

Code: Select all

bash-2.05b$ cat /etc/fstab
# /etc/fstab -- static file system information
# auto generation: on
# generated by: /sbin/etcdev2fstab
#
# NOTE: to make this file readable, it has been formatted for 132 columns
#
#<device>                              <mountpoint>      <fstype>  <options>                                       <dbg> <pass>
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part6  /                 ext3      defaults                                        0     0
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part1  /disks/C         vfat  rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,nouser,async,umask=0,showexec=no 0  0
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part8  /disks/D         vfat  rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,nouser,async,umask=0,showexec=no 0  0
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part7  /home             reiserfs  rw                                              0     0
/dev/cdroms/cdrom0                      /mnt/cdrom0       iso9660   ro,nosuid,nodev,exec,user,noauto,async,unhide   0     0
/dev/fd0                                /mnt/fd0          auto      rw,nosuid,nodev,exec,nouser,noauto,async        0     0
proc                                    /proc             proc      rw                                              0     0
usbdevfs                                /proc/bus/usb     usbdevfs  rw,devmode=0666                                 0     0
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part5  none              swap      sw                                              0     0
/dev/scsi/host1/bus0/target0/lun0/part1 zip1              auto      rw,suid,nodev,exec,nouser,noauto,async          0     0


this is bizarre to me, much more so than mandrake's one, and much more over the top than slack's one (which is highly commented, but atleast makes proper sense). when i have time i will be rewriting this file from scratch using a brain rather than an automatic installer, but can anybody tell me why it is in this format which is to me unconventional?

[Void Main]

The only thing that probably seems strange is the device names right? Those are the new "devfs" names rather than the old /dev names. It's actually more logical but certainly more verbose. I really doubt it's a mount problem though. If you can "su - someuser" from a root shell and write to the user's home directory as that user then that ain't the problem. Did the user's ".xsession-errors" file have anything in it?

Here's how to get it to boot without kdm:
http://forums.xandros.com/viewtopic.php ... t=runlevel

[Calum]

thank you for looking into this void main! i don't have a lot of time right now so i am commenting out the /home partition line, and will have /home on the root partition for now, will test using symlinks etc to see if users can read/write etc to their home dirs on hda7 later, and will look into that link and the .xsession-errors too later.

Xandros is the bollocks! it is justwhat i wanted mandrake to turn into! it had a little disappointment in that /dev/mixer and /dev/dsp were inaccessible by users other than root (requiring the usual chmod that one does after a slack install) which i found incongruous with the restof the OS's almost seamless imitation of windows 2000 (well, the layout, but with all the familiarity of KDE for those who are used to it). basically, this is the linux that users of mandrake, lycoris and lindows would be using if they had heard about it!

wish this partitions thing hadn't happened though, this will probably be a serious issue when this OS gets taken up more. the review i read said the installer won't allow you to put /usr on a seperate partition either, i suspect it's something deep in the OS that i am going to have problems finding, and will probably have to use symlinks etc to fix it.

[Calum]

xandros kicks ass!! this is AMAZING! everything is GREAT! there's one of everything and it's all set up! you don't have to hunt for newer versions of everything because it all works, plus there's not 18 programs that all do the same job! plus all the apt-get is there and fully works right away! you get a GUI which contacts xandros for updates, but apt-get seems to be totally independent because i updated xandros using the GUI, then popped open konsole (the only xterm included) and did apt-get dist-upgrade (did not need to update or anything) and got a further 50MB of upgrades.

quick too. i just used apt to install gimp (not included sadly in xandros) and it took less than a minute, and added itself to the xandros launch menu, and in the right section!

this is exactly what lindows, mandrake etc want to be. good idea basing it on debian, and being thorough about creating a proper integrated OS and apps instead of the beta type efforts from other distros.

[Void Main]

Glad to hear you like it. Welcome to the world of Debian! Did you get your user logon thing figured out? I really don't believe it has anything to do with the mounting as mentioned before but would surely like to know what you find out. I have to assume it isn't a common problem or we would have seen it in the reviews. Strange...

BTW, did you finally get yourself a broadband connection? Seems like you only had a modem connection not too long ago.

[Calum]

yes, i now live in a flat with some people who already had installed BT broadband, so cool. it can be up to 8 times as fast as dialup, so i see.

as for this login issue, yes have sorted it. i now mount /dev/hda7 at /mnt/home, and /home is a symlink pointing to /mnt/home - this sorts the problem, although i have NO idea why to be honest, i have not changed the mount options from the default settings for that partition.

[Ice9]

Funny to see that you've taken the Xandros route, as I've bought Xandros Desktop Deluxe myself a couple of weeks ago.
I wiped my RH8 installation and took the plunge with Xandros and Libranet 2.8 (which I had downloaded some time ago)

At first I wasn't too thrilled about Xandros and liked Libranet a lot better, now I don't know.
I find myself fiddling a lot more with Libranet than with Xandros but I might end up installing it on my wife's pc, perhaps even on the pc that the kids use.
I guess I like the standard stuff from Libranet more than the heavy customized stuff from Xandros when it comes to my personal use.