just before the pitt/ucla game last night, watching NCAA, LiveTV and Mythfrontend crash on my diskless frontend. i'm at the xserver desktop, but nothing responds. i can move the cursor, but not get to fluxbox or open a terminal window. lazily, i try restart x with ctl-alt-backspace. the screen flickers as x tries to start and then i get the dreaded:
so, i take a look at the Xorg.0.log and the only warnings or errors that i get have to do with not finding font files in "/usr/share/font". and at the end, i get this:
nothing else looks out of the ordinary, and there are no error lines ([EE]).

even weirder, when i su into root after the respawning message, i can run startx and everything is fine. as root, i can run mythfrontend and watchtv, etc.

so, why can't i do this as the main user (mythtv)? my search on the interweb seems to indicate that the FreeFontPath message is benign and probably not the problem, but then what could it be? what settings can the root user see and not my "mythtv" user?

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#R5.5#
ATSC OTA on FE/BE - EPoX EP-8KDA7I, AMD Athlon 64 3200+, 512MB RAM, GeForce FX5200, Kworld ATSC-110x2
FE - Antec NSK2400, ABIT NF-M2 (w/GeForce 6150), Athlon 64 3800+, 1 GB RAM

Perhaps the temporary file that X uses is causing issues. It's generally in /tmp/.X0-lock or something like that. Delete the file as root, and then restart X normally as the mythtv user.

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Perth, Western Australia.

R5F1
P4 3.2Ghz (Northwood)
AsRock P4i65G
Nvidia FX5200 (Fanless)
512Mb PC 3200
2 x WDC WD1200JB-00FUA0 120Gb PATA
Atheros AR5212 802.11abg NIC
DVD-RW ASUS DRW-1608P2S
2 x DVICO DVB-T Lite

good idea! but different file... the ".xserver-errors" file in my user home directory was HUGE. whatever error in LiveTV that caused myth and x to crash wrote over 2GB in the error file (like 30 lines every fraction of a second)! deleted that file and VIOLA! x starts right up.

thanks for the suggestion!

_________________
#R5.5#
ATSC OTA on FE/BE - EPoX EP-8KDA7I, AMD Athlon 64 3200+, 512MB RAM, GeForce FX5200, Kworld ATSC-110x2
FE - Antec NSK2400, ABIT NF-M2 (w/GeForce 6150), Athlon 64 3800+, 1 GB RAM