Neither SLiM nor GDM work 100% correctly

ibrahim · 2006-08-22 16:03:43

I was having problems with GDM from when I first installed Arch and eventually I settled on slim as a replacement. That worked well for some time until just recently.

The problem is that for some reason slim won't create an Xauthority file on login. To be honest I'm not 100% certain if it ever did, the problem comes about when I try to use gksudo to open an app for starting daemons. I don't recall ever using gksudo until fairly recently so maybe it was always like this, I don't know. Anyway, I get an error along the lines of (at work now and can't remember precisely) "Error copying user .Xauthority file. File does not exist"

touch ~/.Xauthority solves the problem and everything works after that but it's a bit annoying.

With this in mind I thought I'd give GDm another try. The main problem I had previously was that I don't consistently use the same WM/DE and when picking a session from the GDM chooser it would log into FVWM no matter what. Last night I tracked that down to being because of my .xinitrc. I renamed it and picking sessions now work ok. The new problem I have with GDM is that somehow my $PATH var is not respected. Gmrun, gnome menus and key binds and FVWM menus and key binds all refuse to run commands in my path as if the files don't exist. More specifically dirs I added such as ~/.bin and /opt/firefox are not recognised. In urxvt echo $PATH shows everything as it should and I can actually launch apps from there. can this be related to GDM or is it just a coincidence on the timing of it breaking?

Either way, if anyone has any advice as to how I could get either of these login managers to work I'd greatly appreciate it

sh__ · 2006-08-22 23:57:32

ibrahim wrote:

The problem is that for some reason slim won't create an Xauthority file on login.

Yeah, it seems the X authorization in slim is currently incomplete.

ibrahim wrote:

touch ~/.Xauthority solves the problem and everything works after that but it's a bit annoying.

Couldn't you put that into your .xinitrc?

ibrahim wrote:

The main problem I had previously was that I don't consistently use the same WM/DE and when picking a session from the GDM chooser it would log into FVWM no matter what. Last night I tracked that down to being because of my .xinitrc. I renamed it and picking sessions now work ok. The new problem I have with GDM is that somehow my $PATH var is not respected. Gmrun, gnome menus and key binds and FVWM menus and key binds all refuse to run commands in my path as if the files don't exist. More specifically dirs I added such as ~/.bin and /opt/firefox are not recognised. In urxvt echo $PATH shows everything as it should and I can actually launch apps from there. can this be related to GDM or is it just a coincidence on the timing of it breaking?

Are you setting your $PATH in .bashrc or some other shell initialization file? Chances are it's not picked up by gdm when X starts. If gdm reads .xinitrc, this might be solved by setting $PATH somewhere in .xinitrc (and commenting out the fvwm part if it's causing trouble).

Of course one could set $PATH globally in /etc/profile.

tomk · 2006-08-23 08:21:42

I use slim, and I have ~/.Xauthority - not much help to you, I know, but if there's anything I can tell you about my setup, let me know.

Re your path problem, apart from __sh's .xinitrc suggestion, it's worth mentioning that any required opt/ paths are added automatically when the relevant app is installed e.g. install firefox, and you get /etc/profile.d/mozilla-common.sh, which sets

export PATH="${PATH}:/opt/mozilla/bin"

and is included in /etc/profile.

ibrahim · 2006-08-23 10:34:24

Thanks for the responses guys. I'd got around the slim problem by adding

if [ ! -e $HOME/.Xauthority ] then;
touch $HOME/.Xauthority
fi

to my bashrc.

I'll try that suggestion about adding my $PATH to xinitrc when I get home from work and see if that fixes things with gdm

Mr Green · 2006-08-23 12:30:39

latest slim version I cannot get rid of X cursor ..... pypanel does not always fire up as it should ....

GDM whats that lol .....

Arch Linux

#1 2006-08-22 16:03:43

Neither SLiM nor GDM work 100% correctly

#2 2006-08-22 23:57:32

Re: Neither SLiM nor GDM work 100% correctly

#3 2006-08-23 08:21:42

Re: Neither SLiM nor GDM work 100% correctly

#4 2006-08-23 10:34:24

Re: Neither SLiM nor GDM work 100% correctly

#5 2006-08-23 12:30:39

Re: Neither SLiM nor GDM work 100% correctly

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