~/xinitrc problemo?

J-P · 2008-02-28 14:48:35

Hi people. After my upgrade went crazy in ubuntu I decided to backup my home directory to the old USB drive and swing my way around to using archlinux. From what I've heard its a great distro.

I was following the beginners guide with no problems and Gnome (with extras) took an age to download, but thats not what confused me.

I ammended xinitrc so it no longer tries to exec xterm... and I inserted gdm/hal etc into rc.config as demons. Reboot happened and now GDM appears but still only with Xterm.

Is there something really obvious that I've cocked up? I know it's a pretty stupid/noob question but help please! I promise I'll read more when I have a system that works .

RobbeR49 · 2008-02-28 15:41:54

/.xinitrc only comes into play when you start X manually like when you punch "startx" into your term.

GDM should automatically detect Gnome and add it as a choice when picking your sessions, so it seems that is your main problem.

I would disable GDM and go back to your /.xinitrc file and put exec gnome-session on the last line, then try startx to make sure Gnome and Xorg are set up and working correctly.

If that works fine then you can concentrate on getting GDM to recognize Gnome, but at least you'll have a way to get into Gnome easily.

Last edited by RobbeR49 (2008-02-28 15:44:11)

SiC · 2008-02-28 16:13:14

try using slim instead of gdm, you probably don't need the remote login features of it so it won't be a loss.

thayer · 2008-02-28 17:45:20

I think you need to clarify what exactly is happening when GDM appears. As has been pointed out, .xinitrc is not for use with GNOME if you are also using GDM. When GDM is used, GDM is what will start GNOME. .xinitrc is something you would use instead of GDM.

Are you greeted with a colourful login screen that has mouse support? When you enter your username and password, what happens?

Last edited by thayer (2008-02-28 18:06:30)

J-P · 2008-02-28 18:47:56

Thank you all for the quick response. I just got back from work so I'll boot up and check a few things out... O.K

To clarify matters a little (thayer) I boot and GDM shows up all nice and shiny (i installed the theme listed in the beginners guide). The sessions it has available are only Failsafe Gnome / Failsafe Terminal (or Xclient script).

I modified the /.xinitrc to contain "exec gnome-session" - this led to the same deal as before. I also get a message stating "System has no X clients file, so starting a failsafe xterm session" ... fairly obvious then that it loads xterm. However one positive point is that the mouse works and all is otherwise normal.

- I removed GDM and I'm doing a "pacman -Sy gnome-extra" which is upgrading gnome. I shall see if this changes anything (in beginners guide it states just to do pacman -S gnome gnome-extra). Can I provide any further info?

I did try entering startx under root, where it prompted me with the fact that root had no /.xinitrc file >> ergo I made one and booted again. X booted and promptly crashed. Any wisdom? I'm just hoping that after the above gnome install this will now work (assuming it crashed because of my dodgy /.xinitrc which just stated "exec gnome-session")

If you need to know anything else let me know, I'll see what I can figure out on this end but won't do anything too drastic. Thanks once again for the help so far

RobbeR49 · 2008-02-28 20:11:20

J-P wrote:

- I removed GDM and I'm doing a "pacman -Sy gnome-extra" which is upgrading gnome.

Is this the same command you ran originally to install Gnome? Just to be clear: "pacman -S gnome" installs the basic Gnome packages, "pacman -S gnome-extra" will install the non-required (extra) Gnome packages, so you do need both. Even with dependencies I don't know if just gnome-extra would pull in everything you need, and this could by why you're not seeing a regular Gnome session in GDM.

J-P wrote:

I did try entering startx under root, where it prompted me with the fact that root had no /.xinitrc file >> ergo I made one and booted again. X booted and promptly crashed. Any wisdom? I'm just hoping that after the above gnome install this will now work (assuming it crashed because of my dodgy /.xinitrc which just stated "exec gnome-session")

you shouldn't need to mess with logging in under root, that's just complicating things. Also there's nothing dodgy about exec gnome-session in your /.xinitrc, it should work perfectly fine if you've installed Gnome correctly. (it's really no different than what GDM does when you log in, anyway).

and if X is crashing then the culprit is probably a misconfigured xorg.conf, not /.xinitrc

Last edited by RobbeR49 (2008-02-29 14:53:56)

thayer · 2008-02-28 21:26:59

Running GNOME without GDM I believe will strip your ability to shutdown/suspend from within the GNOME menu.

J-P · 2008-02-28 23:43:55

aha! I got it. I'm now happily inside Gnome - I tested my system with openbox to see if it really was xorg but that worked fine... so

I now feel like a complete idiot as for some reason it hadn't installed fully beforehand. I did use the pacman -S gnome gnome-extra command...

Thayer, you're right. It did end up stripping my ability to shutdown/suspend. The only thing I'm noticing now is a strange slowness on my internet speed while browsing. I'll have a play and see what else needs tweaking.

Thanks for the help guys.

Arch Linux

#1 2008-02-28 14:48:35

~/xinitrc problemo?

#2 2008-02-28 15:41:54

Re: ~/xinitrc problemo?

#3 2008-02-28 16:13:14

Re: ~/xinitrc problemo?

#4 2008-02-28 17:45:20

Re: ~/xinitrc problemo?

#5 2008-02-28 18:47:56

Re: ~/xinitrc problemo?

#6 2008-02-28 20:11:20

Re: ~/xinitrc problemo?

#7 2008-02-28 21:26:59

Re: ~/xinitrc problemo?

#8 2008-02-28 23:43:55

Re: ~/xinitrc problemo?

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