What on earth just happened?

[Tom Horsley]

I ran yum update this morning, getting a gazillion updates.
I rebooted the system.

When it came back up, I couldn't log in. I'd get a KDM screen,
login, then immediately get the KDM screen again.

I tried to login with a "failsafe" session which gave me
(apparently) an xterm that printed black rectangles
for all characters :-).

I tried other sessions like xfce and gnome and got the
same KDM login screen popping back up after I typed
my password.

I got in a vterm as root, created a new user, and
logged in as that user with a default gnome session.
That seemed to work fine. I decided I should compare
what is running in the session with my original
user, so I logged out and logged in again as original
user, and now my original user login works fine.

Logging in once as a different user appears to have
completely fixed the system.

What the heck was that? (It will be interesting to
see if the same sequence happens when I install the
latest updates at home).

[Dr J Austin]

On Fri, 2014-05-09 at 08:31 -0400, Tom Horsley wrote:
> I ran yum update this morning, getting a gazillion updates.
> I rebooted the system.
>
> When it came back up, I couldn't log in. I'd get a KDM screen,
> login, then immediately get the KDM screen again.
>
> I tried to login with a "failsafe" session which gave me
> (apparently) an xterm that printed black rectangles
> for all characters :-).
>
> I tried other sessions like xfce and gnome and got the
> same KDM login screen popping back up after I typed
> my password.
>
> I got in a vterm as root, created a new user, and
> logged in as that user with a default gnome session.
> That seemed to work fine. I decided I should compare
> what is running in the session with my original
> user, so I logged out and logged in again as original
> user, and now my original user login works fine.
>
> Logging in once as a different user appears to have
> completely fixed the system.
>
> What the heck was that? (It will be interesting to
> see if the same sequence happens when I install the
> latest updates at home).

Glad I'm not the only one with a problem!
kdm and xfce

I have two workarounds
> From Cont/Alt/F2 window as root

systemctl disable kdm.service
systemctl stop kdm.service
systemctl enable lightdm.service
systemctl start lightdm.service
OR
yum downgrade kdm libkworkspace kgreeter-plugins  kde-workspace \
kde-workspace-libs kcm_colors kde-style-oxygen

I will try your solution next

John

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Fri, May 09, 2014 at 15:54:54 +0100,
  John Austin  wrote:
> Glad I'm not the only one with a problem!
> kdm and xfce

I saw this problem in rawhide for about a week, but it recently cleared up. 
Other than someone else chiming in that they saw it too, I didn't get any 
feedback on the bug. After it started working again I closed the bug.

[Rex Dieter]

Tom Horsley wrote:
> I ran yum update this morning, getting a gazillion updates.
> I rebooted the system.
>
> When it came back up, I couldn't log in. I'd get a KDM screen,
> login, then immediately get the KDM screen again.
>
> I tried to login with a "failsafe" session which gave me
> (apparently) an xterm that printed black rectangles
> for all characters :-).
>
> I tried other sessions like xfce and gnome and got the
> same KDM login screen popping back up after I typed
> my password

I think you hit 
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1095920

I think 4.11.9-4 build should fix it (coming to updates-testing soon).

-- Rex

[Tom Horsley]

On Fri, 09 May 2014 10:29:14 -0500
Rex Dieter wrote:
> I think you hit 
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1095920
>
> I think 4.11.9-4 build should fix it (coming to updates-testing soon).

Could be - maybe it didn't stop because I logged in as a different
user, maybe it stopped because address space randomization loaded
it at a different place or something :-).

Good to see it is a known bug, and not me going insane.