Some bizarre Linux issues
So I’ve been having some bizarre Linux issues of late. These essentially involve
bizarre and nonlinear interactions of
- gdm
- X11
- .xsession & .xinitrc files
- alsa (huh?)
I’m not certain how gdm deals with going from running as root to running as
whichever user logged in. But whatever it is, it yields some bizarre results. There
are several different strange behaviors going on, which I have a hunch are all symptoms
of a single underlying misconfiguration on my part, somewhere.
- Firstly, gdm entirely ignores my .xsession & .xinitrc files. I don’t know
it’s supposed to, but it does. No matter though, as a cheap temporary hack I’ve
just replaced the file referred to in /usr/share/xsessions/xmonad.desktop with my
own nicer xsession that starts up desired goodies (like trayer, xmobar, whatever). - Secondly, and this is where things get strange: I’d like to avoid gdm
entirely, but I can’t at the moment. I’m held hostage by the fact that I
can’t use ALSA unless I’m using gdm. That’s right – when I use startx myself,
ALSA doesn’t work. When I login using gdm, ALSA works fine. - What’s weirder is, when I login and use e.g. nvlc to try to play music
directly from a tty, ALSA works fine! WTF?
This is all incredibly frustrating of course, because I want to get started on my toy
project, but my bizarre OCD-like obsession with having the perfect environmental setup
won’t let me stop hacking on the damn X11 configs trying to get this right.
Arg.