8.3 - Can't restart/kill X or log out of xdm/gdm/etc.

[oaul]

Running 8.3 on a mobility x700 on Debian lenny. If i try to restart X or logout of gdm, everything disappears on my desktop and I'm left with just a wallpaper...and it hangs. This didn't happen until about 8.1 i think, and suffice to say it's a big pain in the ass.

I can usually kill the x server, but when i get to the terminal it says something like "trying to kill xserver" for like 10 seconds, and says it failed. After stopping xdm and removing /tmp/.X0-lock, `ps` still lists the /usr/bin/X process as <defunct> and Xorg hogs 99% cpu when I start another X session.

I'm working on capturing the output of killing X.

Any help or emotional support would be awesome. Has this happened to anyone else?
There are no (EE)'s in my xorg log, except something about the font path.

[oaul]

Fixed my problem by passing --overlay-type=opengl to aticonfig. Before i guess i lost my all my overlay entries in xorg.con, and the X problem is solved by using Xv overlay, but Xv videos didn't work in vlc/xine/mplayer. So i just tried opengl and everything is working great.

[oaul]

Fixed my problem by passing --overlay-type=opengl to aticonfig. Before i guess i lost my all my overlay entries in xorg.con, and the X problem is solved by using Xv overlay, but Xv videos didn't work in vlc/xine/mplayer. So i just tried opengl and everything is working great.

...yeah that was a fluke. I still have the same problems. There were times that logging out/ killing X worked since before the release of 8.x, so i suppose X behaving correctly after tinkering w/ overlay was just a coincidence. My request for anyone else's advice/emotional support still stands.

[bridgman]

Take a look here :

http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showt...ntsd#post28164

... then follow the link in that post. This has helped some people. There seem to be two problems which conspire to get you -- atieventsd doesn't react gracefully when it can't find a certain file, and on some distros the script which runs atieventsd points to the wrong place. The short term fix is to edit the script so that it does point at the file's correct location -- long term fix is making sure the script points to the right place *and* making atieventsd log a message before dying.

EDIT, sorry, you have to follow two links off the post linked above, not one. In other words, click on the link above which gets you to a post - that post has a link to another post, which has a link to ANOTHER post, which tells you the answer, hopefully

Or just click here : http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showp...&postcount=126

[oaul]

Thanks for the response. I see that my authatieventsd.sh does in fact point to the right *.Xauth file. Good idea - but FWIW as i said sometime my computer logs out/restarts X just fine. It seems to work most often shortly after I log in via *dm or startx. I'm also using 32bit debian unlike these posters but i saw that someone might have been using an acer mobo; I'll look into it at work today...

EDIT:
I should also mention that I can turn off/reboot my computer via `shutdown` or `reboot` just fine.