Bug 21939

Summary: 'gdm murdered' causes reboots, system not able to stabilise
Product: [Retired] Red Hat Linux Reporter: shivaji apte <shivaji_apte>
Component: gdmAssignee: Havoc Pennington <hp>
Status: CLOSED DUPLICATE QA Contact: Aaron Brown <abrown>
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: 7.0CC: giulioo
Target Milestone: ---   
Target Release: ---   
Hardware: i386   
OS: Linux   
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version: Doc Type: Bug Fix
Doc Text:
Story Points: ---
Clone Of: Environment:
Last Closed: 2000-12-13 09:47:32 UTC Type: ---
Regression: --- Mount Type: ---
Documentation: --- CRM:
Verified Versions: Category: ---
oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team: --- Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description shivaji apte 2000-12-08 09:06:29 UTC
I have Red Hat 7.0 on an Intel Acer machine (128MB RAM, 10 GB HDD).

The box was up and ok. Then, I used Linuxconf to change the boot mode 
to 'text and network' instead of 'graphics and network' and saved.
I rebooted. Text mode came up fine.
But just when I try to log-in, screen starts blinking and I error messages 
saying something like ' gdm was running but has been somehow murdered...
' then something about 'gdm.pid ...' and the system reboots.
I don't even get time to do 'ps -ef | grep gdm' and kill it or like that.

I don't know why gdm is starting in the first place. It should not in text 
mode, right ?
And I am not able to debug or do anything as the system reboots within 20 
seconds of booting up.

Comment 1 Havoc Pennington 2000-12-08 15:44:16 UTC
Hmm. Not sure what linuxconf does if you choose that, I'll ask. In the meantime
to get running again, type "linux 1" at the boot: prompt to start in single-user
mode, edit the file /etc/inittab, change the line "id:5:initdefault:" to
have a 3 instead of a 5.


Comment 2 giulioo 2000-12-10 12:59:56 UTC
My initdefault is 5. Card is i810.
I frequently get the "murdered" message when I switch to a tty and then try to 
return to X. Sometime X is there, sometime it's not and I get a new X login and 
all my open apps are vanished. Sometime X is F9 instead of F7.

I don't know if my problem is due to gdm (as the error message seems to 
indicate) or to XFree4.0.1 having problems after a tty switch (like other bug 
reports suggests, ie bug 18651)



Comment 3 shivaji apte 2000-12-13 09:47:28 UTC
I have found why using Linuxconf causes problems for me.
Basically, the default X-server that came could give only 640x480 resolution as 
it couldn't detect the video ram on my i82815 based agp card.
So, I had download the X-server from Intel's site (its XFCom_i810) and 
linked /usr/X11R6/bin/XF86_SVGA to it and also linked /etc/X11/X 
to /usr/X11R6/bin/XF86_SVGA. 
Then, everything was fine. However, when I used Linuxconf again, it resetted my 
custom settings and hence I was getting the problem.



Comment 4 Havoc Pennington 2001-01-05 18:25:24 UTC
Merging with other 'gdm murdered' bugs

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 23259 ***