Login/xfce start issue (Solved)

[sparkyhall]

I am posting this really to help others rather than as a cry for help as I have managed to implement a work around for now. But if anyone has any ideas or suggestions please feel free to post.

Been having a slight problem login into VL5.9 standard pretty much ever since I installed. Initially I thought I must have typed my password incorrectly but as time went on I figured I can't be that bad at typing....can I?. I eventually changed my password to be just the enter key thinking I can't possibly get that wrong yet still I had problems. What happens is I hit enter at the kdm login screen, xfce goes through its start-up process then sometimes it all works and other times I get bounced back to the kdm login screen. Well this has been going on for a couple of months now so I decided it was about time I tried to figure out what was going on.

I started by trying a number of restarts to try and get feel for how bad this issue was, well out of 11 restarts 6 worked OK and 5 bounced me back to the kdm login screen and one of those bounced me back twice, you can see why it has become a little frustrating. Next I performed the same test on VL light on the machine 10 out of 10 OK, then I tried on a fresh install of VL5.9 standard and once again 10 out of 10 OK. At this point I decided that perhaps I had messed something up on my original install so I set about installing the apps I need and tweaking the new install to suit my needs well what can I say.....I'd just about finished and I discover that my login issue had returned...oh flip it!! 

To cut an even longer story short my wife prefers to single click the limited number of desktop icon she has. As many of you know xfce does not support single click desktop icons so to overcome this I remove all but the trash can icon and use wbar to provide single click functionality. To remove individual default icons I created a file called xfdesktoprc and placed this in /home/mywife/.config/xfce4/desktop as described on the xfce website. Well what do you know it's this very file that gives this strange login behavior why I know not.

[file-icons]
show-filesystem=false
show-home=false
show-trash=true
show-removable=false

I have tried reducing the file to a single line, setting everything to true and false but still I have login problems, the only way to fix them is to either remove or rename the file. At this stage I'm not sure is this is a xfce issue or a vl issue, I have a xubuntu disk somewhere so I might give that a try and see what that does but in the mean time if anyone has any ideas please speak up.

One thing I should point out is although I refer to this as a login issue I think it's more of a xfce start issue because if you do incorrectly type your password you get a message telling you so, in this case I just get bounced back to the login screen after xfce has failed to start.

Chris

[overthere]

if you like single click simplicity consider chooseing fluxbox at login...here are some screenshots

Fluxbox with wmdrawer open and a couple of handy dock apps, with Rocks screensaver as wallpaper

http://files.myopera.com/dsl-o/albums/550557/fluxbox.jpg

Round corners & useing the rocks saver as wallpaper

http://files.myopera.com/dsl-o/albums/550557/round1.jpg

http://files.myopera.com/dsl-o/albums/550557/round2.jpg

There are some customization tips here on post 9

http://forum.vectorlinux.com/index.php?topic=5767.0

[wcs]

xfce goes through its start-up process then sometimes it all works and other times I get bounced back to the kdm login screen. Well this has been going on for a couple of months now so I decided it was about time I tried to figure out what was going on.

I have a similar experience.
Going back to the login screen almost never happens to me. But it happens very frequently to my girlfriend. So, I checked it, and it seems the problem is restricted to when I login to her account (the second user on the login screen).

Interesting that it might be related to the desktop icons.... But in my case, I have the file in my home directory, with everything set to false (and no login problem at all).
She has no xfdesktoprc file (so far as I know), everything is the same as the fresh install, and all desktop icons... but she does have the login problem!

So, I suppose I get the inverse situation: having the file for no desktop icons is fine; not having it messes up the login. 
Weird!

[sparkyhall]

if you like single click simplicity consider chooseing fluxbox at login...here are some screenshots

You have a pretty impressive desktop there overthere so I'll bare flux box in mind. It's my wife that likes single click rather than me and at the moment she's not over impressed with linux mainly because it's different so I need to tread carefully.

I have a similar experience.

I think I spoke too soon as although removing xfdesktoprc appears to have resolved my log in issue it's still there on my wifes account so I'm not sure what to think now. I have tried xubuntu 7.10 with single account and I didn't see any issues there but due to the nature if this issue I don't think it means anything yet.

I'll keep plugging on to see if I can get any further but to be honest I'm at a bit of loss to know what to do next. Are there any log files for xfce that I can look at?

Hmmm.....I think this has now turned into a cry for help......Help!

Chris

[wcs]

Maybe it has something to do with there being two acounts. Perhaps a kdm issue, and not an xfce one.

But it's also true that I haven't seen this for a while, so perhaps some recent upgrades I've done fixed it....
I really don't know...

[sparkyhall]

I'd have thought there would more than just you and me with two accounts but I guess it could be related. When I started looking into this I thought it may be a kdm issue so I upgraded from kdm 3.5.5 to 3.5.8, the one used on vl light but it was still the same. I could try using xdm for while to see if that helps I suppose.

What I have noticed is it only appears to happen after a power on or reboot I think ie once you have logged in you seem to be able to log in and out as much as you like without issue. I've reached the stage where I think I can recite everything that is displayed on the start-up screen because I've seen it so many times now. 

That gives me a few more things to try so thanks.

Chris

[caitlyn]

Chris: 

Just a thought:  You could try a different display manager (wdm, Slim, even good old xdm) and see if they work properly.  No, you won't have the features of kdm but at least that will help you determine if your problem is the display manager or Xfce.  xdm is already installed on any VL system.

HTH

[wcs]

What I have noticed is it only appears to happen after a power on or reboot I think ie once you have logged in you seem to be able to log in and out as much as you like without issue

True! That was when it happened to me as well.... very strange.

I'll test it a bit more and try different login managers. Thanks, caitlyn.

[sparkyhall]

Thanks for the replies. The xdm display manager gives the same results so it doesn't look like a display manager issue. Switching to xdm was harder than expected because using vasm to do this simply does not work so I ended up modifying rc.x instead.

Digging a bit deeper into my original problem revealed that an error was logged in 'xsession.error' for failed log ins.

   stderr is not a tty - where are you?
   Agent pid 3135
   _IceTransSocketUNIXCreateListener: ...SocketCreateListener() failed
   _IceTransMakeAllCOTSServerListeners: server already running
   xfce4-session: Unable to establish ICE listeners: Cannot establish any listening sockets
   Agent pid 3135 killed

I have no idea what an ICE listener is so after a bit of googling I discovered that an ICE socket is normally created in /tmp/.ICE-unix so this seemed like a good place to start. I also observed that the number allocated to the socket is the same as xfce-sessions pid and it only seemed to fail if there was already a socket with the same number. My initial thought was that the socket permissions are wrong but they are all rwxrwxrwx with some created by my account, some by root and some by my wifes account so perhaps it's a group problem?

My next step was to delete all sockets to see if that helps....well 20 reboots later and not one failure. I have now added 'rm /tmp/.ICE-unix/*' to the end of rc.local so that all old sockets get removed at startup. Ooh look at me I'm starting to sound like I know what I'm talking about.

If anyone can shed some more light on this or tell me why I should not be deleting sockets at start the please speak.

Chris

[wcs]

I'm impressed! 
Nice catch. I'll give that one a try as well.

Wonder if those sockets are actually needed....
(they somehow *look* like they are, don't they?)

[sparkyhall]

Hi wcs,

In my quest to solve this I remember reading somewhere that some distros clear .ICE-unix at startup. I have had a look at xubuntu 7.10 and I can confirm that is what they do so I guess it will be OK.

I'll mark this thread as solved in a week or so if you confirm this fix works for you.

Chris

[wcs]

I haven't tried your fix yet.

But, hey, I just got the problem again!
When logging in to my first user no problem.
I added another user, which made my "normal" one go to second place in kdm. Bam, problem!
(which I find very weird, because that's just a kdm order, the "normal" one was still the first in /etc/passwd).

I'll try the fix today and let you know.

[sparkyhall]

I have been running with my modified rc.local file for several weeks now and I have not seen any start up issues since so I have marked this thread as solved.

chris