Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 145898
Fails and restarts continuously after upgrade from FC2 to FC3
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:10:58 EST
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i586; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0 Description of problem: The X server seems to restart continuously, making it almost impossible to work in other virtual terminals, as Linux is continuously switched to tty7. After a while I get a message saying the display manager has restarted six times in the last 90 seconds, will wait two minutes before trying again. Disabling gdm in inittab, and running gdm under strace reveals that gdmgreeter tries to open a file /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TTF/Vera.ttf which does not exist, then exits with status 1. The directory contains a fonts.cache-1 file which lists a number of Vera*.ttf files none of which exist in the directory. Renaming it to save-config.cache-1 solved the problem. However, the greeter should survive such a situation. (I do not remember the fontconfig interface, it is possible that this should be fixed in e.g. pango, having it go on to the next font when the first attempted fails for whatever reason.) Also, the greeter writes a warning message to file descriptor 2, but this has been opened against /dev/null, making it excessively hard to diagnose the problem. While the config file has an option to fill the syslog with debug messages, when a condition is severe enough to warrant exiting, the associated error messages should be recorded somewhere. Syslog with severity LOG_ERR or even LOG_CRIT would be approprate. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): gdm-2.6.0.5-6 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Add Bitstream Vera fonts to some directory, run fc-cache on this directory to refresh or create fonts.cache-1 2. Remove the font files 3. In the font configuration, make sure this directory is searched before any other having the Bitstream Vera fonts. Also, in the list of preferred fonts for sans-serif, place Bitstream Vera at top. (This is the default.) 4. Restart gdm, e.g. log out and wait for gdm to set up a new login screen. Actual Results: There is no login screen; instead the display is repeatedly reset to graphical mode in virtual tty7, until a character-mode screen shows a message that the display manager has beed restarted six times. Expected Results: A login prompting screen Additional info: My computer is a AMD K6-2 450Mhz, otherwise plain vanilla.
Fedora Core 3 is now maintained by the Fedora Legacy project for security updates only. If this problem is a security issue, please reopen and reassign to the Fedora Legacy product. If it is not a security issue and hasn't been resolved in the current FC5 updates or in the FC6 test release, reopen and change the version to match. Thank you!
The information we've requested above is required in order to review this problem report further and diagnose/fix the issue if it is still present. Since there haven't been any updates to the report in quite a long time now after we've requested additional information, we're assuming the problem is either no longer present in our current OS release, or that there is no longer any interest in tracking the problem. Setting status to CANTFIX, however if you still experience this problem after updating to our latest Fedora Core release and are still interested in Red Hat tracking the issue, and assisting in troubleshooting the problem, please feel free to provide the information requested above, and reopen the report. Thank you in advance. (this message is mass message)