On Sun, Mar 29, 2015 at 02:07:52PM +1100, Daniel Jitnah wrote:
Have you tried another dm? XDM or KDM for example?
nope, and I don't really want to. lightdm works on my other boxes, it should work on this one too. It used to work until a few months ago. i'm assuming that there's something weird in my pam or whatever config which is causing this - this particular machine has been upgraded for years and even though all the hardware has been replaced many times, IIRC it has never been rebuilt from scratch since i first installed debian on it in 1994. so there's bound to be lots of weird old cruft in /etc one of the other machines is almost as old, the others are relatively new (a few years and a few weeks old respectively).
Does it crash X or just return to a login prompt without restarting X?
no crash, it just returns to the X login screen. craig -- craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au> BOFH excuse #105: UPS interrupted the server's power