[newbie] Installation Woes

[James Hofmann]

Bob and Christine wrote:

>Problems:
>
>1. Keyboard.  The right shift key (a) fails to register the first key
>stroke upon being depressed  (b) subsequent key strokes are in lower case.
>The left shift key is fully operable.
>2. Even more serious, during last Sunday's install user and superuser
>passwords were made IDENTICAL to eachother! 
>
I did this for years, using a very simple password since security at 
that time was worth a whole lot less than simplicity.
Changing a password takes only a few seconds once you get past typing it 
in every 30 seconds, especially the root
password.

> It should be noted that the
>printer could not be made to operate at that time despite Owen's and Tom's
>best efforts.  Possibly this may also be involved in the subsequent crash
>when making first fumblings toward GNOME from the root login.  I typed
>'startx', clicked on the Main Menu Button (footprint), dragged mouse to
>Logout selection, then clicked on Yes in a separate window.  That's when
>all hell broke loose.
>	'X cancel' causes no response in the separate window with a RED
>TRIANGLE containing an '!', but a second separate window with a RED CIRCLE
>WITH A HORIZONTAL YELLOW BAR permits me to depress a button entitled
>'submit a bug report'.  (Above the button is statement 'Application "gmc"
>(process 849) has crashed due to a fatal error (segmentation fault).
>Please visit GNOME Application Crash page for more info.)  A partial bug
>report follows:
>
>	...ssertion 'option menu != null' failed.
>AUDIT:  Sat Jan 25 01:58:39 2003: 807 X: client 5 rejected from localhost
>Xlib: connection to ": 0.0" refused by Server
>Xlib: Cllient is not authorized to connect to  Server
>xscreensaver: Can't open display: :0
>xscreensaver: initial effective uid/gid was root/root(0/0)
>xscreensaver: running as nobody/nobody (99/99)
>
>xscreensaver: Errors at startup are usually authorization Did you read the
>manual and the FAG?  Specifically, the parts of the manual that talk about
>XAUTH, XDM, and root logins?
>
>	http://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/man.html
>
>ICE error: Offending minor opcode	=7 (protocol setup)
>	Offending sequence number	=5
>	Error: class			=SetupFailed
>	Severity:			=FatalToProtocol
>Reason: A session shutdown is in progress.
>
>waiting for X server to shut down Gdk -Error**: X connection to :0.0 broken
>(explicit kill or server shut down).
>  
>
Can't even guess at much here.  On my system, "nobody" is a sort of 
special account.  I think I would
go through the "adding a user to the system" routine again.  I would 
become root and then try to add
a user from the command line with "adduser" command.

In my humble opinion, "segmentation fault" always means a bug in the 
program, but  perhaps you can 
work around it by having one's account as the program expected it to be. 
 Did you get a proper home
directory with some possibly hidden initialization files and 
directories.  When you create a second
user, do you get the same stuff in the new user's home directory?

regards,
Jim.