[plug] Debian apt-get through a proxy

[Nick Bannon]

On Wed, Nov 17, 1999 at 12:34:18PM +0800, Steve Grasso wrote:
[...]
> And while I'm here (here's a dumb one) all of a sudden this box (debian slink
> with KDE) has stopped firing up X for ordinary users. Accepts
> username/password, blinks a few times and reverts back to KDE login screen.
> I've had a poke around as root looking for stuffed X config files, permissions
> etc and all appears to be normal. Again, any ideas?

As X starts up, one program will end up being the session manager and the
X session will be open for as long as that program runs. If it dies or
fails to start correctly you can get exactly that sort of thing happening.

Now - the plain X startup script will probably be /etc/X11/Xsession -
it does a few things, then if there's a user $HOME/.xsession script
it will pass control to it (with exec). If not, it'll do a failsafe
default to perhaps opening an Xterm and twm. Error messages will be
sent to a file such as $HOME/.xsession-errors. The KDE startup will
be a different script, but may be organised very similarly - certainly
GNOME is, the scripts are kept in /etc/X11/gdm/Sessions and errors go
to $HOME/.gnome-errors .

The problem usually happens when someone's fiddling around with their own
.xsession type file (changing window managers, etc). If they just start a
couple of programs then quit - oops they've just quit the session manager
and X goes back to the login prompt. The last thing they should do is exec
the program they want to be the session manager - eg a window manager.
If they mispell that - oops, the exec fails and they're back to a login
prompt again. That's why the default Xsession script has those checks
and a failsafe fallback thing to execute. ::-)

However, just recently I had it happen with the default scripts when I
switched to OpenSSH - instead of just "exec startupcommand --arguments"
the script did "exec ssh-agent startupcommand --arguments" and ssh-agent
mistakenly thought the arguments were for it, failed to understand them,
and quit with an error message in the -errors file. This was fixed and
updated pretty much immediately.

Nick.

-- 
  Nick Bannon  | "I made this letter longer than usual because
nick at it.net.au | I lack the time to make it shorter." - Pascal