[PLUG] GDM in some of the newer distros (Was Fwd: Re: Mandriva 2010)

[Arun Khan]

I am spawning a new thread because I have seen similar problem, that 
Mahagsagar reports, with other distros as well.

On Tuesday 08 Dec 2009, म.हा.सा.ग.र wrote:
>
> Meaning machine is rendered non-responsive to any key combination. 
> So only choice is to hardboot it by pressing on-off switch.
>
> Sometimes this has to be done 2-3 times before X can correctly get
> started and machine does not give that stare or gaze to the user.

I am also experiencing this with openSUSE 11.2 on my sister's laptop (a 
3.5 yrs old HP Pavilion with AMD Athlon and ATI XPress 200M)

I have not done much debugging but I suspect this has to do with 
openSUSE's strategy of generting the config (aka xorg.conf) on the fly 
each time the system is booted.

On a newer laptop (Aspire 5542):

The only distro that works out of the box is openSUSE 11.2 (ATI Radeon 
HD 4200).   The ATI BLOB driver installed after 3 attempts; compiz and 
KDE4 3D effects work with the prop. driver.

Ubuntu 9.10, Mandriva 2010 install but fail to bring up the GDM and fall 
back to CLI login.  "startx" from CLI ends up in black screen with 
locked keyboard.

Fedora 12 Live after booting and loading up shows a black screen; 
keyboard is locked - power off is the only solution to recover.

In openSUSE, I have been able to solve the problem partially by using 
sax2 (from CLI) to generate a xorg.conf but have no clue on other 
distros.  Would appreciate pointers by Ubuntu/Fedora/Mandriva users.

-- 
Arun Khan