Disabled XFCE Session Manager, now can't login

[Chris G]

On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 09:12:06AM -0700, David Mohr wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 2:43 AM, Chris G <cl at isbd.net> wrote:
> > On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 11:50:18AM +0530, Jay Mistry wrote:
> >> > If you see the splash screen, then the session manager is already enabled.
> >> >  Something's causing it to quit.  You'll want to look at console output.
> >> >  Try logging in directly to a virtual console (not through GDM or some other
> >> > display manager) and running 'startxfce4' from the command line.  That might
> >> > help you figure out what's going wrong.
> >> >
> >> >        -brian
> >>
> >> I logged in as a regular user at RL 3 from grub boot menu. After
> >> entering 'startxfce4', the same thing happened as earlier. The XFCE
> >> Splash Screen (with mouse) appeared and there was a display at the
> >> bottom of the same stating what modules were loading. The XFCE desktop
> >> came on very briefly for about a second before crashing, after the HP
> >> SysTRay load message. After this, it went back to console-view and
> >> displayed about 20 lines of Error Message, am not sure where they
> >> would be so unable to post them here. Looked in Yast -> System Log,
> >> but the console error messages were not there.
> >>
> > How about looking in ~/.xsession-errors in a console session, that
> > might well give you a clue.
> 
> AFAIK ~/.xsession-errors is a Debian-based distro thing only, and also
> only works when using a display manager like gdm.
> 
I'm sure I used to look in ~/.xsession-errors when I ran Slackware and
on our Solaris boxes at work.  A quick Google suggests that it does
get written in just about every distribution, I spotted Mandrake,
Fedora and Suse at least.

You're probably right about it being set up by the display manager
though but I thought from the thread that the OP was running a session
manager.  The problem was in fact that he wasn't running from a
terminal and thus couldn't see the errors, the display manager
redirects stdout/stderr to ~/.xsession-errors for this very reason.


-- 
Chris Green