Bug 367833 – kdm greeter fails to run as kdm user in KDE 4.6.2

• Product: Gentoo Linux
• Status: RESOLVED FIXED

[Description Kevin Lyles 2011-05-17 22:38:30 UTC]

If I let the kdm greeter run as the kdm user, the greeter will error out and X closes.  Startx still works as any user, and commenting out GreeterUID in /usr/share/config/kdm/kdmrc allows the greeter to run as expected.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Use the default value (kdm) for GreeterUID in /usr/share/config/kdm/kdmrc
2. Run /etc/init.d/xdm start

Actual Results:  
kdm fails to start and X closes

/var/log/daemon.log has this:
kdm: :0[2400]: Received unknown or unexpected command -2 from greeter 
kdm: :0[2400]: Abnormal termination of greeter for display :0, code 1, signal 0

/var/log/kdm.log has this:
No protocol specified 
kdmgreet: cannot connect to X server :0

Expected Results:  
kdm starts as it did before the upgrade

I did follow the KDE upgrade guide at http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/desktop/kde/kde44-46-upgrade.xml.  Once the issue came up, I also rebuilt world and went over my config files again.

I currently have the GreeterUID line commented out but would prefer to run the greeter as a non-root user.

[Comment 1 Jonathan Callen (RETIRED) 2011-05-18 00:18:06 UTC]

Someone else had a similar issue a couple days ago, and in their case, they somehow had gotten bad permissions on /var/run/xauth.  Could you check to see if that's the case? (The directory should be mode 0755, owned by 0:0)

[Comment 2 Kevin Lyles 2011-05-18 01:01:38 UTC]

(In reply to comment #1)
> Someone else had a similar issue a couple days ago, and in their case, they
> somehow had gotten bad permissions on /var/run/xauth.  Could you check to see
> if that's the case? (The directory should be mode 0755, owned by 0:0)

That does in fact fix the issue.  Thank you!

I have a feeling the "bad" permissions are due to my default umask of 077.

[Comment 3 Andreas K. Hüttel 2011-05-28 19:07:48 UTC]

OK, there's not much we can do here anymore.