[vox-tech] KDE on FreeBSD Hanging on login

[Jeffrey J. Nonken]

On Wed, 30 Nov 2005 00:01:36 -0800, Bill Kendrick wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 29, 2005 at 08:26:06PM -0800, Michael Benedetti wrote:
> 
>> I am a newbie to FreeBSD.

Me too, but I've done some of this lately, so it's fresh on my mind. 
Not to mention fresh in my bookmarks. :)
>> 
>> I managed to get the install to work after
>> three tries, and even configured it to boot directly to the KDE
>> boot manager, where I can login.  I have a few minor issues,
>> beginning with the inability to login using the KDE boot manager.
>>  This behavior started as soon as I tried to use the KDE boot
>> manager to start Gnome. (I wanted to automount the cd drives, and
>> read that Gnome does this by default, while I was not able to
>> accomplish this in KDE.  I am getting an error whenever I try to
>> mount the CD in KDE.)
>> 
> 
>> The Console Login seems to be inoperative.
>> 
> As in text-mode?  (Under Linux, typically accessed via
> Ctrl+Alt+F1..F6, etc.)

IIRC KDM gives you the option to choose your window manager, shut 
down, or log into a console (terminal emulator) session. Sounds like 
the terminal emulator isn't working either.

Michael, early in the boot process you should see a text menu come up 
with something like an 8 second timeout. There will be an ASCII art 
BSD Demon on the right. If you hit "3" before it times out it should 
put you to a failsafe session, which I HOPE would not get you into 
KDM. If that doesn't work, try again with "4". If that doesn't work, 
boot off a bloody Knoppix or FreeSBIE CD and you'll be able to access 
everything as a mounted data drive. Or...
> 
> If you're on a network, it should also be possible to login
> remotely, to see what's going on.

...another good suggestion. What you need is a command prompt and a 
text editor, or whatever nice GUI editor Knoppix gives you, or some 
such. That, and root access.



The first step I'd take would be to disable KDM, log in on the command 
line, and type "startx" to see if you can log into X at all. Here's 
how we do that:

Get into your command prompt (discussed above) and login as your 
regular user. If you can't do that (you went through Knoppix or 
something) cd /home/username relative to the mount point. Remove or 
rename the file called .xinitrc. That will stop you trying to log into 
a window manager.

Then you need to edit /etc/ttys (again relative to the mount point, if 
on a live CD). This is where you need root access. You'll find a line 
similar to this:

ttyv8   "/usr/X11R6/bin/xdm -nodaemon"  xterm   off secure

...only it'll have the kdm manager and it'll say "on". You need to 
change "on" to "off" and save it. [Ref: 
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/x-xdm.html]


Reboot, it should get you to a command prompt this time. I don't know 
if you're new to *nix so I won't go into detail about getting X 
running, but you need to do that. The handbook has more details than I 
can cover anyway: 
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/x-config.htm
l

That wraps on my screen, that should end with "html". Not gonna turn 
wrapping off for that, though. Use this instead if you like: 
http://tinyurl.com/5k5wg

Once you have X working, try running KDE as a window manager without 
using a display manager. Log in as your user and enter the following:

echo "exec startkde" > ~/.xinitrc

[Ref: 
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/x11-wm.html]

Then type "startx" and it should come up in KDE. If it is, you're 
golden, at least as regards KDE.

Go back and fix that line in /etc/ttys, reboot, and see if KDM will 
let you log in now. If not... I don't know where to go from there, but 
you'll have verified that X itself works, and KDE works, and now you 
know how to enable and disable KDM.