It looks like quite a few peiople have a problem with KDM not autostarting sometimes after reboot. It helps in most of the cases if you enter some chars with keyboard or move the mouse right away when you see the login prompt. People say that it could be somthing connected to keyboard/mouse input system or some timeout that is set to help some slower systems. See this forum topic for more details about the problem and suggested workarounds: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?p=1600816#1600816 Reproducible: Sometimes Steps to Reproduce: 1. Make sure KDM is set as display manager 2. Reboot computer 3. Wait to see the KDM login prompt Actual Results: Sometimes the KDM login prompt doesn't come up even if you wait for a very long time. Expected Results: The KDM login prompt should always come up. I'm not sure if this is KDE/KDM problem or some problem with Gentoo startup script.
same here. what i can say more is probably it's not kdm/kde issue because i noticed this bug alsa with simple xdm.
i ment "also" not "alsa" ;|
I changed the Summary. Does anyone have the same issue with GDM?
I don't believe this to be a kde bug since mouse or keyboard input will allow kdm to start as normal. If you just move your mouse around about the time "local" starts kdm will load up as it should. This seems to have started happening around Sept. 12th, the link to the forum posts shows that the likely suspect could be a udev or hotplug update. This problem isn't present sometimes either when the system starts and "emerge world -e" did not change anything either. I'm using a usb keyboard and usb mouse and have evdev support in the kernel.
well, it apears gdm works fine - 3 reboots with no prblems
I believe this is an issue with XDM itself. Even if I have rc.conf set to with DISPLAYMANAGER="xdm", xdm still does not load. It doesn't seem matter what DISPLAYMANAGER is set to.
I tried reemerging baselayout as some people told me it could help (because /var/lock was changed from 0755 to 0775). Unfortenly it didn't. What else cold be wrong?
I found this one in the forum. Maybe the problem has something to do with our bug... Just an idea... http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=236345
I have it on my Athlon running x86, sometimes. I dont have it on this P4 laptop running x86, but it has an ~x86 baselayout for wireless support. Both have KDE 3.3.1.
Uh oh.. exists on the laptop too :S grr.
I have this theory... kdm and kdm share code to send authorization stuff to the X server, this code needs some entropy to produce random bytes, and the entropy is gathered from DEV_RANDOM. The code knows the value of DEV_RANDOM from the files in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/config/, and xorg-x11-6.8.0 sets that value to "/dev/random". It is well-known that reading from /dev/random blocks if there's not enough entropy in the system, and that mouse movements or keypresses can produce that entropy...
I just realized that to avoid this problem, one can just add 'urandom' as a service: 'rc-update add urandom default'. This will preserve the entropy pool across reboots, and kdm will have enough random bits to create the keys.
It looks like Debian had the same problem at one point. See http://lists.debian.org/debian-qt-kde/2004/04/msg00215.html for more information on how to confirm it. The solution is described in http://lists.debian.org/debian-qt-kde/2004/04/msg00224.html which agrees with the /dev/random and entropy theory in comment 11. Console output: mark@localhost ~ $ strings /usr/kde/3.3/bin/kdm | grep urandom mark@localhost ~ $ strings /usr/kde/3.3/bin/kdm | grep random /dev/random Cannot read randomDevice %"s: %m Cannot open randomDevice %"s: %m To fix the problem, edit /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/config/X11.tmpl and change line 1291 from "# define RandomDeviceFile /dev/random" to "# define RandomDeviceFile /dev/urandom". I think kdebase (which contains kdm) needs to be recompiled after this change.
I just discovered that the kdm config file (/usr/kde/3.3/share/config/kdm/kdmrc) has an option RandomDevice for this purpose. If someone tests that it works (set RandomDevice=/dev/urandom there) then it will be considered the preferred method to solve this issue, and we can close this bug.
Setting RandomDevice to /dev/urandom worked for me. KDM loads properly now. Thanks for the tip.
Great. Since this is not a real bug, but a (very tricky) configuration issue, we can close it now.
