[Techtalk] killed my xserver

[Maria McKinley]

Akkana Peck wrote:
> Maria McKinley writes:
>> Hello,
>>
>> I upgraded (some packages, not the kernel), and now I can't run X. :-( I 
>> am running Debian stable, Linux version 2.6.8-2-k7. I have tried to 
>> re-configure XF86Config-4 with the exact specs of my monitor, but this 
>> didn't help. I can't find anything useful in the logs either. Nothing 
>> marked error. The only clue is that if I try to do startx (instead of 
>> starting it with gdm), I get this message in XFree86.0.log
>>
>> AUDIT: Fri Dec  7 00:43:40 2007: 4399 X: client 5 rejected from local host
> 
> One thing I'm not clear on -- does X run, but refuse to let clients
> connect to it, as this message would imply? Or does X actually exit
> and you get your shell prompt back?

I get a message that says: The display server has been shut down about 6 
times in the last 90 seconds, it is likely something bad is going on. I 
will wait for 2 minutes before trying again on diplay :0

> 
> I don't know the answer either way, but that would help with
> figuring out ways to start tracking the problem down.
> 
> I'm seeing lots of pages describing this problem when I google:
> http://www.google.com/search?q=client+%22rejected+from+local+host%22
> It seems to have several different causes and fixes, so you
> might have to try several different approaches -- for some
> people it works to remove .Xauthority, for other people it
> seems to be a problem with a library, like the nvidioha libglx.so
> (so commenting out the glx line on /etc/X11/xorg.conf would probably
> test for that).
> 
> 	...Akkana

Thanks for the ideas, unfortunately neither of these changes had any 
effect. It did however, make me aware that there is another log file in 
the home directory of the user starting x, .xsession-errors. Why on 
earth the same error messages would not appear in a /var/log file is 
beyond me. Here are the error messages at the end of that file:

(gnome_segv:16834): Pango-WARNING **: No builtin or dynamically loaded 
modules
were found. Pango will not work correctly. This probably means
there was an error in the creation of:
   '/etc/pango/pango.modules'
You may be able to recreate this file by running pango-querymodules.
Fontconfig error: Cannot load default config file
No fonts found; this probably means that the fontconfig
library is not correctly configured. You may need to
edit the fonts.conf configuration file. More information
about fontconfig can be found in the fontconfig(3) manual
page and on http://fontconfig.org
gnome-smproxy: unable to connect to session manager


I don't have anything called pango-querymodules, and I don't know what 
is going on with my fonts, but now I have more stuff to google...

thanks,
maria