[vox-tech] xdm died unprovokedly

[Karsten M. Self]

on Thu, Jan 23, 2003 at 08:00:46PM -0800, Ken Bloom (kabloom@ucdavis.edu) wrote:
> I left my computer for an hour and a half to eat dinner and attend an 
> important meeting and while I was gone XDM died without a trace, except 
> for the contents of /var/log/xdm.log, and I had to go root to restart 
> XDM. This has happened to me once before that I am aware of.
> 
> I have enclosed /var/log/xdm.log. Does anybody have any idea what my 
> problem might be? 
> 
> (Come to think of it, I'm about to upgrade to -4 from unstable, which 
> says it "fixes server crash when a screen fails to initialise". I wonder 
> if this is what's happening.)
> 

<...>

> GetModeLine - hdsp: 1280 hbeg: 1328 hend: 1440 httl: 1688
>               vdsp: 1024 vbeg: 1025 vend: 1028 vttl: 1066 flags: 5
> xdm error (pid 295): Server for display :0 terminated unexpectedly: 0
> xdm error (pid 295): Unknown session exit code 2816 from process 4200

A few suggestions:

  - Is this a reproduceable error?  If it doesn't happen again, ignore
    it.  There are occasional app failures which can bring down X.

  - How long have you been using this configuration?  Any prior errors?

  - I've had bad luck with XF86v4 on some older video cards.  In
    particular, one box would run (the other doesn't, at least not for
    display results that qualify), but would crash the X server when
    XDMCP screen blanking cut in.  The solution was to disable this
    (both in XF86Config-4 and xscreensaver's config).  Note that this
    blanking generally occurs after 10-15 minutes of inactivity.

  - What app was it that crashed?  What was running on your X session at
    the time?

  - You might also investigate switching to XF86v3.

Peace.

-- 
Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com>        http://kmself.home.netcom.com/
 What Part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
   Keep software free.         Oppose the CBDTPA.         Kill S.2048 dead.
     http://www.eff.org/alerts/20020322_eff_cbdtpa_alert.html