On 06/22/2012 08:58 AM, Andrew Z wrote:
> Hello,
> i have the sl 6.2 on Toshiba satellite that worked fine. Last week when
> i tried to boot it my x session hanged and i could never see my desktop.
> Messages xlog and sessions files have nothing that gave me any clues. I
> removed xorg.conf. No change.
> Here is current situation.
> If i login as root - all works. If i login as regular user the following
> series of the events happens.
> Login prompt -> some window pops up asking if i want to load default or
> old config. Then all goes black and the only thing that responses is mouse.
> Switching to tty takes good 3 -4 minutes . Yet top indicates no high
> cpu  usage .

Some X managers can get crazy if they can't find the settings data they 
are looking for. It looks like your old settings aren't being found.

Are you on a networked file system, or are there any unique storage 
things happening at all? As in, do you have the root file system on one 
partition and /home on another drive or something?

The easiest way to test whether its access to /home or not (whether 
network, hardware issue, whatever) would be to login as root and create 
a new user, then see if you can log in as that user. If you can log in 
with no problem, then probably just a config file is corrupted and you 
can fix the problem by removing that one file and letting the X manager 
regenerate it.

Of course, "which file?" is a fun question, so the slow-going way is to 
move things like ~/.kde/ ~/.gnome2/ ~/.gnome2_private/ ~/.nautilus/ and 
other things like that (maybe even ~/.ICEauthority) one at a time and 
test to see if the situation changes any with each move. You'll move one 
at some point that makes everything suddenly better. My guess is moving 
~/.gnome2/ will probably be that file -- but you'll have to re-do 
whatever custom settings you've done, which is annnoying but better than 
nothing.

Alternatively you could just create a new user, migrate the data you 
actually want to keep from your old home directory

The nuclear option is, of course, to just remove all dotfiles at once 
and log in the GUI to force it to recreate everything. But if you have 
anything special or any other programs than the desktop are storing 
stuff it would probably get wiped too, so this probably isn't wise (I'd 
be pissed if I lost my Ekiga phonebook, my bookmarks, everything in 
~/.wine/, not to mention my KBreakout high scores!).