Hi everyone,

I installed Mandrake Linux 8.1 a few weeks ago. Got the nvidia drivers, ximian desktop, webmin, samba, and VMWare 3 all installed and working wonderfully. I boot into a command line (this is nice because when X crashes, it kicks me back to command line instead of "freezing" the machine.

Well, a day ago X starts crashing during the startup process (logged in as a user). That is, when I "startx," the NVidia logo displays, the gnome startup begins to display, then poof!, back to command line. When I log in as root, I don't have this problem.

The same thing manifested itself on a previous installation of ML8.1 on the same machine (Athlon 750 w/ 512MB RAM on Asus A7V m/b).

My suspicion (an admittedly naive one) is that a configuration file has been corrupted. Has anyone experienced similar problems or have any advice?

Thanks,
Pingo

Look in your home directory for a file named ".X.err". If it is there, it is a log of errors that occurred during the last X session. See if you can figure out what happened from that. If not, post the last few lines and maybe someone can help.

Couldn't find such a file. There is a file entitled .xsession-errors, but it is empty. Although the command line lists several of the startup parameters (appear to be NVidia-related), the only semi-informative line is:

Waiting for X Server to shut down

Is there a way (how?) to pipe the complete console output to a file? Maybe an error is getting thrown up, but it scrolls off the screen.

This is frustrating

Thanks

Okay, I created another user. Everything was working fine. One of the annoying experiences that I've had with ML8.1 is it freezing up upon a "halt" at the step of halting "Eth0." Because this is sporadic, I never tried to really fix it as the file system is XFS and I assume can withstand a reset.

Anyway, Linux froze on halting device ETH0 with the new user I had created. Upon restarting and logging in again as this user, "startx" fails soon after the Nvidia logo appears.

So, I think that I've linked the "startx" failure to a botched "halt." Does this give anyone any ideas as to what might be wrong?

Thanks

P.S. my .xsession-errors file has a single line that says:
"Unable to lock ICE authority file /home/user/.ICEauthority"

Deleting $HOME/.ICEauthority* does the trick. "startx" doesn't fail anymore.