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gauthma

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Registered: 2010-02-16

Posts: 215

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KDE: can't log in unless logged in from tty

The subject pretty much says it all. When the username and password are entered correctly, the (KDM) login form disappears, sometimes I even get a glimpse of the nvidia logo, but then the screen goes black, and the login form is shown again. This happens even if KDM is not running as a daemon (i.e. KDM is not crashing and than automatically restarted). If I login in a console first, then login in KDM runs normally. When searching through daemon.log, I found this:

kdm_greet[948]: Cannot load /usr/share/apps/kdm/faces/.default.face: No such file or directory

I quick googling yielded a bug report from 3 years ago, and a couple of links that suggest it's related to the login problem:

https://www.linuxquestions.org/question … en-832318/
http://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=66&t=92867

None yielded any help, though. From what I could grasp, the apps/kdm folder belongs to kdebase-workspace. I reinstalled it, but the file is stil missing. Also, it's not only the file that is missing, rather, the faces folder does not exist. Has anyone encountered this behaviour before?

UPDATE: this issue is a lot weirder than what I had originally thought it to be. I'm not sure if it is related to the fact that I had previously erased the contents of /tmp (due to space shortage) whilst logged in KDE (not a good thing, I know), but after that, I have (from the console, without X running) deleted the contents of /tmp, /var/tmp, and ~/.kde4. The problem remained: I could not login into KDE unless I first logged in from console, as my regular user. If I logged in from console as root, and then su into my regular user, that would not suffice to enable me to login from KDM. I've tried to run KDM both as a daemon and from inittab. In the former case, I could login from console, using my regular user, and then restart KDM with sudo, and KDM would log me in *automatically* (I had auto-login enabled for that same user). But either as a daemon or from inittab, I am still unable to login from KDM unless I first login from a console. I've also removed kdmrc, and a new one was generated, but the problem remained. The logs were not of much use (but I'll reproduce here any log I am asked for).

UPDATE 2: I forgot to mention that if I login in console, then login in KDM, then logout in console, then logout of my KDE session, and try to login again (in KDM), this also does not work.

Currently I am starting X manually from console (with exec startkde in .xinitrc), but I would like my old setup back... (not to mention that fact that I am really curious/annoyed as to what could be causing such an odd behaviour!). So, ideas anyone? (it goes without saying that I googled this extensively, but to no avail...)

Last edited by gauthma (2012-03-29 11:27:01)