This is part of The Pile, a partial archive of some open source mailing lists and newsgroups.
From: "Per A. Larsen" <palarsen@topend.com.au> Date: Thu, 28 Jan 1999 02:36:01 +1000 Subject: Re: XDM driving me nuts Lorin Hochstein wrote: > Hope this hasn't been asked and answered a million times... > > I upgraded from Redhat 4.x (don't remember) to RedHat 5.0. RH5.0 comes > with xdm, and it's driving me nuts. When I try to use a non-root account > to log in, it looks like it's going to log in, then returns to the login > screen again. (i.e. only logging in with root works). > > When I first upgraded, I guess my old accounts weren't configured > properly for xdm, since I got a different error. It would log in, but I > wouldn't be able to bring up an xterm or anything (clicking the mouse > buttons essentially brought up no options). > > When I created new accounts, logging in works. However, now it doesn't > (for non-root accounts). This started happening somewhere near the time > when I got a cable modem, so perhaps running dhcpcd has something to do > with it...? > > If anyone has encountered a similar quirk? If so, what do you about it? > > Oh, and one other thing... How do you quit the darn thing? I've been > using the "kill" command, since I can't figure out any other way! May I suggest you're on the wrong track. Since XFree86 3.3.2 your Xserver had to be started by Xwrapper for non-root accounts. It's done in your .xserverrc by changing X to Xwrapper. My non-root .xserverrc reads as follows: exec Xwrapper :0 -bpp 16 dpms This start my server in 16 bit per pixel with powersaving on. You have to have a green monitor for dpms to work and the server has to support it. I hope this is relevant to your problem. ===