On Tue, 12 Oct 2004, Barry Hawkins wrote: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > List, > I rebooted after waking from suspend on my Titanium PowerBook G4 > 500MHz and began experiencing an inability to log on via the KDM > prompt. I would enter my credentials, the screen would go black, then > show the default X background, then reload the KDM login prompt. I > went to a console login via Alt + N, and was able to login there. When > trying to run startx, the following errors are encountered among the > XFree86 output: > > Writing authority file /home/barryh/.Xauthority > /usr/bin/X11/startx: line 131: /dev/null: Permission denies
It sounds as if /dev/null has been trashed. Does `ls -l /dev/null' show something like this ? crw-rw-rw- 1 root root 1, 3 (a date) /dev/null If it's just the permissions, chmod 666 /dev/null. If something has overwritten it so that it's now a regular file, delete it and mknod -m 666 /dev/null c 1 3 When /dev/null doesn't work, all bets are off in trying to interpret other errors. Ken -- das eine Mal als Tragödie, das andere Mal als Farce
