From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008061517 Red Hat/3.0-2.el5 Firefox/3.0 Description of problem: kdm cannot start the "Default" Gnome desktop when an even empty .xsession file exists. When "Gnome" instead of "Default" is selected in kdm as session type kdm will be able to start kdm. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): kdebase-workspace-4.0.5-3.fc9.i386 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. touch $HOME/.xsession && chmod u+x $HOME/.xsession 2. Select "Default" (Gnome was the default) session type in kdm 3. Select "Gnome" session type in kdm as comparison Actual Results: The screen will go black and the kdm greeter will reaper (Steps to Reproduce: 2.) Expected Results: The Gnome desktop starts up (Steps to Reproduce: 3.) Additional info: than has seen a live demonstration of the bug.
rpm -q xorg-x11-xinit-session please
My suspicion is that it is installed, and when it is, tries to use ~/.xsession, and since it is empty, does nothing, and immediately ends the session.
Yeah, Than already debugged the problem and explained it to me as "user error": Default for kdm means use .xsession if it exists else .xclients else Gnome else KDE, etc. gdm doesn't have this "Default" notion. Please feel free to close the ticket.