MDM not working (as a service anymore)

[thorx89]

Hi,

All of a sudden, I started having some serious issues with MDM -- in short, it won't start, leaving me at the console.
Tinkering around a bit, I found out that startx works just fine and so does starting /sbin/mdm directly, however, accessing mdm via the service interface (service mdm start/restart/stop) always fails. sudo /etc/init.d/mdm start fails as well.
No logs are being generated in /var/log/mdm .
My current version of mdm is 1.2.5, and I'm on Linux Mint Maya 13.

I have currently installed lightdm to get by temporarily, but I would like to solve this issue.
Anyone having the same problem? Any luck solving it?

[karlchen]

Hello, thorx89.

The correct commandline is

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sudo service mdm start/restart/stop

Yet, during the late boot phase the upstart routines are run by root. So no "sudo" needs to be prefixed. And more importantly the command should be executed automatically and correctly.
When mdm is not running, what does the commandline

Code: Select all

service mdm start

tell you exactly?

Kind regards,
Karl

[thorx89]

Hi,
thanks for the reply.
It doesn't really say anything, it simply doesn't work anymore.

Logs in /var/log show that the "mdm main processes terminated with status 127".
I can't seem to be able to get it to spill out any more information.

[thorx89]

OK, I figured it out.

I did "man service", finding out that it runs scripts in /etc/init.
Then I went went line by line /etc/init/mdm.conf , which led me to discover that the error was in one of the files mdm.conf was trying to source in, namely in /etc/profile .

Now it's working just fine.

[Rehdon]

Sorry to "necro" the thread, but could you tell me what was wrong with those config files? Because I'm having the same problem, i.e. MDM not starting, after I installed Cinnamon 2.0 under LM 14.

Thanks in advance!

[virtualxtc]

Same issue here. There are other posts else where claim it's font related, but I can't seem to trace it to that. Clearly the OP has a better knoledge of this and it would be sweet if someone told us exactly what is wrong with /etc/init/mdm.conf because the lines in it I see about /etc/profile seem harmless to me, but I really have no clue what they do. Or beter yet, if someone could post a working version of /etc/init/mdm.conf we could diff against that might help shed some light.

For others finding this post, it didn't work for me, but you might want to check here to see if it helps you: http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p ... 8&t=136307

[Rehdon]

Well I installed Linux Mint 16 on a different partition, and was the definitive fix for this issue ...

Rehdon

[Pela]

I think fontconfig made startup services confusion...

I solved this way:

installed fontconfig-infinality (cool!)

on reboot mdm won't start, then execute:

sudo update-rc.d -f mdm remove
sudo update-rc.d mdm defaults

reboot and mdm works again.

hope this help
Pela

[athom]

Thanks for the solution ! I had this problem several times when I installed "Lacie Network Assistant".package file
I don't know why :O

[tonywhelan]

I had installed Lacie Network Assistant today and suffered this mdm failure afterwards.

After 2 hours of getting nowhere I found Pela's post and it worked perfectly. Everything is back to normal again.

Thank you Pela !!!

[Monsta]

installed fontconfig-infinality (cool!)

MDM is incompatible with infinality and Mint developers state that it should be fixed on infinality's side.

[johnniedoo]

This post and an ubuntu wiki recovery page got me back into a blocked or hung up Mint17 . I had installed some font hinting tweak from infinality and fontconfig. it broke the mdm and/or some samba auto upload integration something or other
It was still helpful to me now Sept.4th 2014.
thanks
had run out of hope. i had to learn how to use the recovery mode 'drop to shell 'something so i could read and write to get rid of the offending infinality issue