Open Source News
December 31, 2004
I was in the process of doing a new debian install, so I was expecting a few glitches...
BUT I know this WILL happen to more people and different distro's - So I thought I should share!.
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On boot my Gnome Spash screen was hanging...
On boot my Gnome Spash screen was hanging.
Oddly enough "synaptic" was showing as being run at the bottom of the splash screen. So I flipped over to a console (alt-F1) and did a "ps ax". We saw that "gksu" was trying to run synaptic as root.
We killed the process, flipped back over to gnome (alt-F7) and everything was fine. We rebooted as we expected it to happen again, which it did.
So to get to the bottom of this we started looking around on the net and noticed posts about editing .gconf etc...
BUT before doing anything drastic it dawned on us what was happening - Here's what was going on:
"gksu" was jsut sitting there waiting for a root password to be entered!
It's dialog box was (probably) just hidden by the splash screen box.
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The remaining question is why? Why was it trying to run Synaptic at startup?
Hmmm - Now I do recall at one point when loggin out/shutting down, that the "Save current setup" checkbox was marked. AND - Synaptic was running in another window!
At the time I ignored the message (something like) "Synaptic does not support saving current state"
This is the problem: a user can accidentally "save current setup" which includes a program that requires a dialog box to be filled in (such as in the case of gaining root access.) Next time they log-in the dialog will be hidden by the splash dialog box. Depending on how the program behaves, they could get "stuck" there.
Posted by Iain at December 31, 2004 12:39 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
http://engtech.ca/mt/engtech-tb.cgi/39