X won't come up on C2

[John Watlington]

On Oct 24, 2007, at 12:22 PM, C. Scott Ananian wrote:
> On 10/24/07, John Watlington <wad at laptop.org> wrote:
>>> If it's Trial3, try this:
>>>
>>>  umount /home/olpc/.Xauthority
>
> This seems to be related to machines which change their hostname or IP
> address after first boot; I'm not sure exactly which.  Everyone I
> asked said that there's no way that the Xauthority file should care,
> but it apparently does.  It's not a security feature; it was a feature
> designed to minimize flash rewrites by putting .Xauthority in a tmpfs,
> and this particular line (in /etc/rwtab) has been in the builds for a
> *long* time now (since the 500 series at least; I believe it was added
> by J5).

I did check that the hostname on these machines, and they looked
normal (i.e. last three digits of the MAC plus some text).

I was greatly amiss in not mentioning that I have seen this in 581, but
only on a single machine that had crashed hard many times, and  
reflashing
fixed the problem.   On the C2 machines, reflashing didn't help.

> I'm not sure if we're seeing troubles with C2 machines because you're
> doing "unusual" network operations on them, or if the problem is
> actually in the xorg.conf (as Bernie suspects) or what.

It happens on first (and subsequent) boots.    We haven't touched the
networking at that time.    I hope it is the xorg.conf....

> As Bernie
> said, we've got another approach the fixing the .Xauthority problem
> for FRS (moving .Xauthority out of /home/olpc), but I can probably
> remove /home/olpc/.Xauthority from /etc/rwtab for build -- er, 619 I
> guess -- if that helps.

We will get you more info in a couple of hours.

Go Red Sox !
wad