[juneau-lug] There's never enough time to do it right, but there's always enough time to do it again
- From: James Zuelow <e5z8652@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: jlug <juneau-lug@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 22 Nov 2002 23:43:26 -0900
Well, Juan told me that I'd figure it out when I was packing the car
or when I got home.
The clue was when we started X directly on the server, KDE started up.
Prior to this, KDE wasn't set up on the server. I had installed the
libraries in order to run some KDE programs in Gnome, but never set it
up.
However I had done that apt-get update. After the update, apt
complained that it couldn't configure the XFree86 version 4 xserver,
so asked me to do an `apt-get -f install`. When you do that, and
don't specify a package, apt goes and configures any installed but not
completely configured packages it knows about and downloads and
installs dependencies. Sometimes apt gets into a catch-22 with
dependencies and you need to do the -f install to fix a partially
configured package. Since I was using XFree86 version 3.3.6, I wasn't
too concerned about what it wanted to do with the version 4 server, so
I went ahead and did the `apt-get -f install`.
I was in the middle of packing things in the car, so wasn't really
paying attention to what it was doing. The results of the apt-get -f
install was resetting the X configuration, which explains why I had to
reconfigure X to listen on the network. Another result of the
`apt-get -f install` which I did NOT expect at all, was that apt set
up kdm to launch the KDE desktop. I'm not exactly sure which package
was installed that wanted to have KDE set up, but when I look at the
kdm config files they all have a time stamp of about 5:00-5:30 PM
which is sure suspicious.
For those of you who don't work with X, there are three *dm programs -
xdm, which manages user logins for X, gdm which manages user logins
for Gnome, and kdm which manages user logins for KDE. gdm and kdm
both act as front ends for xdm, which is the "official" login manager.
If you run gdm or kdm, they will interpose themselves between the
user and xdm, so that you see a Gnome login display, or a KDE login
display. Not surprisingly, they do not play well together.
That's what happened tonight. xdm and gdm were configured to accept
network connections. kdm was not. Before I shut down the box, gdm
was active alone and so my tests at home went very well with no
surprises. After I shut down the server & restarted it at the
meeting, gdm and kdm were locked in mortal combat, and the rest of the
X system became collateral damage.
So I apologise for the silly mistake of not rebooting the server while
I was still at home & having time to figure out the problem, and for
the even sillier one of not doing an `apt-get remove kdm` when I saw
that it was configured at the meeting. (Would have solved the problem
with one command line.)
If anyone would like to test a remote X server this weekend, I can set
one up that you can play with from home. YOu'll need a box with X
installed, but not running, and you'll need to type a few commands
before you can start. I can e-mail the commands to anyone who is
interested. (If you have a box that boots to a graphical shell, you
can use telinit to temporarily switch to a non-graphical environment,
then return to your normal environment after you're done playing.)
You need to have a fairly open firewall between you and the box I set
up. And, the box I set up can't have much of a firewall either -
therefore I won't just leave it up or it will get h4xx0r3d pretty
quickly. E-mail if you want to try it out, and I should have a box -
the same one that didn't work tonight - ready by early afternoon or
so. Don't expect a lot of performance over the internet either, as
I've only got a 64kb upload speed.
Cheers,
James
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