Date: Wed, 3 May 2000 10:21:55 +0100 From: "Gallagher, Mick" <mick.gallagher@roke.co.uk> To: "'Chris.Smith@raytheon.co.uk'" <Chris.Smith@raytheon.co.uk>, 'Christoph Sold' <so@i-clue.de>, 'Lowell Gilbert' <lowell@world.std.com> Cc: "'questions@freebsd.org'" <questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Cannot login as root using xdm in 3.4R Message-ID: <D76D503DE976D1119C7E00A0C944D87501CA7F7C@RSYS002A>
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Hi All, Thanks for your help with this problem. Just thought I'd send this note to the list so people can find this information in the question archives. The problem seemed to be a result of both the contents of the .xsession file, and the shell I was using at the time. When logging in as a normal user, there was no problem with going through xdm. The .xsession file consisted of one line: exec startkde; and the default shell for the user was bourne. However, this didn't work so well when logging in as root. The .xsession file was the same, but the default shell was csh. (The contents of .xsession-errors read something like 'can't find startkde'). I can only presume that 'exec' within csh spawned a subshell, and in this case $PATH was not defined. This isn't the whole answer, however. I changed root's .xsession file to something like the following: #!/bin/csh <set path here> exec startkde Surprisingly, this worked; even though I mistakenly included 'exec' in my revised .xsession file. In this instance, 'exec' could not have spawned another shell with no path defined! Although its all working now, the reason why is still a mystery. And anyway, as Lowell pointed out, perhaps I shouldn't be running X as root anyhow! Thanks for your help. Mick To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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