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gdmsetup [solved]


Guest gyri
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I'm trying to change my gdm theme and am having some problems. Clicking on the "login window" option in system>configuration>boot and init does nothing. running the command gdmsetup yields the following error:

 

  Failed to connect to socket, sleep 1 second and retry
 Trying failed command again.  Try 2 of 5.
 Failed to connect to socket, sleep 1 second and retry
 Trying failed command again.  Try 3 of 5.
 Failed to connect to socket, sleep 1 second and retry
 Trying failed command again.  Try 4 of 5.
 Failed to connect to socket, sleep 1 second and retry
 Trying failed command again.  Try 5 of 5.
 Command failed 5 times, aborting.
Could not access GDM configuration file.

 

I've looked around online for solutions and the only thing I can come up with is to rename /etc/rc2.d/S13gdm to S21gdm. In theory this should work great except neither of these two files exist anywhere in my filesystem.

 

Furthermore, I found an almost fix to the problem --

If I run the command gdm and essentially start a second instance of gnome I can then get gdmsetup to open. It allows me to install new themes and change the gdm theme to whatever I want. when i hit ctrl+alt+F7 or F8 I can toggle back and forth between the two running desktops and log in and out of each of them. The second instance displays the new gdm theme whereas the first one does not. When I restart I'm back to the default login screen. If I once again run the command gdm and start up a new instance then the second one uses the new gdm theme still...

 

I'm a little unclear what this means or how to fix it...

 

 

edit:

I tried to restart gdm with the gdm-restart command and got the error:

Can't find the PID file in the configuration file, going to try:
/var/run/gdm.pid
/var/run/gdm.pid doesn't exist, perhaps GDM isn't running

 

I assume this means that GDM is not even running until I invoke the gdm command. My new theory is that if I get gdm to run at startup then the problem is solved. I do have a default graphical login screen but the more I think about it, the more i'm convinced it's not gdm -- in looking at the gdm theme files this one doesn't look anything like what I would expect...

 

Anyway, I have looked for advice on this matter as well and what I've found is to edit the inittab file to have the line

id:5:initdefault:

instead of

id:3:initdefault:

 

Mine was already set to have a run level of 5 so I don't know what the deal is...

 

Thanks for any help you guys have to offer!

 

 

[moved from Software by spinynorman]

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I've looked around online for solutions and the only thing I can come up with is to rename /etc/rc2.d/S13gdm to S21gdm. In theory this should work great except neither of these two files exist anywhere in my filesystem.
The rc2.d directory contains the startup scripts for runlevel 2. Which is a non graphical runlevel AFAIK. The normal is runlevel 5 which is what you have.

You didn't write which distro it is but I assume it's Mandriva. Mandriva is using KDM by default even if it looks like GDM. That would explain why it's not running. Did you change to GDM in the MCC. If not KDM can use GDM themes. All you have to do is install the kdmtheme package and install your new theme with it.

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That would explain it perfectly ;)

 

I don't know where but somehow I fell into the trap of assuming that GDM is just what Mandriva uses (probably on an ubuntu forum, silly me!) so it didn't even occur to me that KDM could be running instead...

 

I changed the setting, it works pefectly. I love simple solutions

Thanks a bunch

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