Bug 253747 – kdm can't start any sessions for kde-4.1

• Product: Gentoo Linux
• Status: RESOLVED FIXED

[Description Shaun Bouckaert 2009-01-04 17:17:12 UTC]

Trying to login via KDM doesn't work after having installed KDE 4.1

It seems the problem is here:

Jan  5 02:48:11 jitterbug kdm: :0 '[28776]: Session "/usr/share/config/kdm/Xsession" execution failed: Permission denied

According to xdmrc

# The program which is run as the user which logs in. It is supposed to
# interpret the session argument (see SessionsDirs) and start an appropriate
# session according to it. Subject to word splitting.
# Default is "/usr/bin/xterm -ls -T"
Session=/usr/share/config/kdm/Xsession

The problem is that this file is not accessible to the user as /usr/share/config has permissions 700 and ownership by root:root

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Tail /var/log/messages
2. Try to log in via kdm

Actual Results:  
The kdm login results in an xterm window, while the you'll get a permission denied error in your messages

Expected Results:  
The Xsession file should be somewhere accessible to the user, as it is executed as the user by kdm

[Comment 1 Hugh Sorby 2009-01-15 04:00:49 UTC]

I had this problem on my laptop.  I found that /usr/share/config was blocking my access.  The fix? I made was to allow read and execute permissions on the directory.

Not convinced this is the right solution though.

[Comment 2 Shaun Bouckaert 2009-01-15 07:40:58 UTC]

(In reply to comment #1)
> I had this problem on my laptop.  I found that /usr/share/config was blocking
> my access.  The fix? I made was to allow read and execute permissions on the
> directory.
> 
> Not convinced this is the right solution though.
> 

I had this thought also, and as I've got a single user system, I see no problem with it. However, having this directory accessible to other users in a multi user system could be a problem.

At least, that's what I'd assume as the reason access is denied in the first place.

[Comment 3 JG 2009-01-30 18:26:57 UTC]

i had the same in 4.2.0 now. the blocked access to /usr/share/config creates more problems like "no text" menu entries all over the place, no right click menu in konsole, ...
see https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=256819

if i read the kdelibs-4.2.0.ebuild correctly, the permissions should be:
# Ensure that the correct permissions are set on ${PREFIX}/share/config
fperms 755 "${PREFIX}"/share/config

[Comment 4 Michael 2009-02-07 03:17:53 UTC]

I can confirm that this happened to me too after updating 3.5.9 -> 3.5.10 -> 4.2.0

[Comment 5 Tomáš Chvátal (RETIRED) 2009-06-13 11:34:05 UTC]

There are some packages that changes permissions to that directory wrongly.
We have eclass code that now detects it and fixes it.

This cant be happening anymore.