Dennis Neumeier posted on Fri, 02 Apr 2010 11:51:48 +0200 as excerpted:
> Well, if you like this that way, okay - that is a solution, but you
> cannot really give this to "normal" users who didn't see a tty up to
> now. So Logon manager is necessary here.
Well, you /could/ give it to them, setting things up so all they see is
the login/password prompt, which should be either a familiar enough
concept regardless of web/gui/cli, or basic and easy enough to explain,
and after they login, their shell is a script that starts x/kde in the
background, sleeps a few seconds, disowns what it started, and exits back
to the login prompt...
Then, all they'd see would be the basic username/password, which should be
either familiar enough or easy enough to explain as a concept, regardless
of whether it's web/gui/cli. The rest would be handled automatically.
But I understand that you don't want to go that way and it's your machine
not mine, so... consider the above a visit to "it could be done if you
wanted to" land. =:^) Meanwhile, let's see if we can make progress on
what you /do/ want...
>> In kcontrol (which has been renamed system settings, altho it's
>> generally kde controls not system settings), advanced user settings,
>> session manager, you can control whether shutdown options are offered
>> and the default leave option. I suspect you may have that set
>> incorrectly.
>
> Wait, you did misunderstand something: The problem is not that I cannot
> shutdown/reboot/logout - I have these options and they are working
> except for the logout. Here is what's happening:
>
> User clicks on "logout" -> user is logged out -> I am taken back to tty
>
> So somehow, the logon screen is not restarted. The question is: How is
> this done? By restarting the xserver or by other means?
Really, I had hoped someone with a bit more personal interest in *DMs
would have stepped up by now. But seeing as they haven't... maybe I can
at least point you in the right direction...
You didn't mention what distribution you're using on your EEE and I know
Gentoo (which I use) handles this a bit differently than many
distributions. You also didn't mention what *DM. KDM, XDM, GDM,
something else?
FWIW, the DM bit stands for "display manager". It's a system service/
daemon that's started like pretty much any other service. Quoting from
the xdm manpage, for an idea of what they do:
<quote>
Xdm provides services similar to those provided by init, getty and login
on character terminals: prompting for login name and password,
authenticating the user, and running a ''session.''
A ''session'' is defined by the lifetime of a particular process; in the
traditional character-based terminal world, it is the user's login shell.
In the xdm context, it is an arbitrary session manager. This is because in
a windowing environment, a user's login shell process does not necessarily
have any terminal-like interface with which to connect. When a real
session manager is not available, a window manager or terminal emulator is
typically used as the ''session manager,'' meaning that termination of
this process terminates the user's session.
When the session is terminated, xdm resets the X server and (optionally)
restarts the whole process.
</quote>
So it would seem that your *DM should be restarting the X server, loading
itself again for the next login. That's not happening.
The next step is to figure out why.
You said you were dumped at the CLI after X terminates, but didn't mention
how you got into X in the first place. I'm presuming that it shows up the
first time, upon initial boot, but you're dumped back at the CLI after the
initial X session terminates. Is that correct? Because if it's not
showing up at boot at all, and you're running startx or the like, that's a
whole different class of problem.
But presuming it starts at boot and you only get dumped at the CLI after
the initial X session terminates, there's a couple possibilities.
1) The *DM is crashing sometime during the initial X session (presumably
after first login), and thus cannot restart X when the user's X session
terminates.
2) The *DM is still there, but for some reason cannot restart X.
So the first thing to figure out is whether the *DM is still there or
not. After you're back at the CLI, does it still appear in the process
list? Using your distribution's rc service tools, does the *DM appear as
running or crashed? What happens if you manually stop and restart it?
If the *DM is crashed after you're back at the CLI, what about when that
original X session is still running? Start a konsole session, switch to a
CLI VT, or use the distribution's graphical rc service tools. Is the *DM
reported as running then, and is the process still listed in the process
list?
And, after you're dumped back at the CLI, check your xorg and previous
xorg logs. (You may well know this, but these will probably exist as
Xorg.0.log and Xorg.0.log.old, in the /var/log/ directory.) If the *DM is
surviving to try to restart X and failing, then the current xorg log will
be the one that it failed to launch, while the previous one will be the
first X session that ran correctly. If the *DM is crashing, then the
current one will be the OK version, as it won't have survived to try a new
version. But here, we're now assuming the *DM survived, but X crashed, in
which case the difference between the two logs could be very helpful, as
the first session worked, while the second session would be the failed one
after which you get returned to the CLI.
It's also possible that your *DM survives thru the first session, starts X
correctly, and then fails to properly load its graphical login prompt the
second time. However, that would most likely show additional visible
artifacts as X successfully restarts, then is ultimately shut down again
when XDM cant load its graphical login prompt. Since you didn't mention
anything of that nature happening and since at that point it would be
getting into XDM internals that would likely be beyond me anyway, I'll
assume it's not getting to that point, and that it's one of the two issues
above.
Hopefully that'll allow you to make /some/ headway...
--
Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
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