Ubuntu
xorg package

on boot cannot open default font fixed

Bug #21001 reported by Rob Adams
8
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
xorg (Ubuntu)
Invalid
Medium
Daniel Stone

Bug Description

With an up-to-date breezy system if I have gdm startup on boot, it will fail to
launch the xserver (logs will show it unable to find the default font fixed).
However, if I simply remove gdm from the system startup and manually start it
using the sudo /etc/init.d/gdm start after booting is finished, it works just fine.

Note that when gdm runs its XKeepsCrashing mode the system hard locks, disabling
all keyboard input. Also, the curses mode doesn't seem to work correctly, as
instead of nice boxes for the curses dialogs I get a bunch of random weird
characters. The only way to recover from this that I've found is hard reset
then boot into single user mode, and then remove the gdm runlevel 2 link using
update-rc.d.

This is on amd64 using the nvidia graphics drivers from the restricted modules
package with a stock kernel.

Will attach my xorg.conf

Revision history for this message
Rob Adams (readams) wrote :

Created an attachment (id=3562)
Xorg.conf

Revision history for this message
Daniel Stone (daniels) wrote :

uhm. if you could attach a log from a failed start, that would be absolutely
invaluable. i have no idea what's going on here.

Revision history for this message
Rob Adams (readams) wrote :

Created an attachment (id=3589)
Xorg.log on a failure

Revision history for this message
Rob Adams (readams) wrote :

Created an attachment (id=3590)
Xorg.log on success when starting gdm manually after boot

Revision history for this message
Rob Adams (readams) wrote :

I played around with this a bit more. The default start priority for gdm is 13
(this is what will result with update-rc.d -f remove gdm; dpkg-reconfigure gdm).
 I tried moving the priority to 99, but it still doesn't work even then.

The only thing I can imagine is that there's something starting asynchronously
that has enough time to finish starting when I have to first log in and do a
sudo /etc/init.d/gdm start but not if gdm is started by init.

Revision history for this message
Rob Adams (readams) wrote :

Wait. A diff on these two logs reveals something extremely interesting. In the
first:
(==) Using config file: "//xorg.conf"

And indeed there's a random xorg.conf (with incorrect font paths!) file in my
root directory. I'm going to see if removing that fixes this.

Revision history for this message
Rob Adams (readams) wrote :

And indeed removing that file fixes this problem. I guess Xorg must have $CWD
in its search path ahead of /etc/X11/Xorg.conf, and during init / is the cwd,
but when I manually did it, $CWD was /home/readams.

I'm not sure if that should be considered a bug or not; certainly it confused me
and I can't imagine why you want that behavior. But you can probably close this
bug at least.

Revision history for this message
Daniel Stone (daniels) wrote :

Mmm. It can be rather unexpected sometimes, yeah, but it's a semantic which
people probably rely on by now. I'm learning (slowly) to always look at which
configuration file is being used in the logs. :) Thanks for the follow-up, and
the catch!

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