kdm/X freezes at logout

[Nesnej]

I yesterday upgraded to 8.04 and faced a highly annoying problem. Whenever I try to log out/shut down/restart using the normal logout switch in the kicker menu, the system proceeds into a state where the screen goes black but the cursor is still visible, themed and all. Then nothing happens. You can move the cursor around, but apart from that, there is no response to anything. Waiting does not help, because it just remains in that state.

I have to hit Ctrl+Alt+Backspace to get X to shut down. This usually takes me to runlevel 3 (console) from there I have to shut down or reboot the system using telinit.

As for the record, my graphics adapter is a nVidia 7600GS and I am using the latest manufacturer-provided drivers. Everything still worked perfectly in Gutsy.

[Klars]

Re: kdm/X freezes at logout

have you installed or tried out KDE-4? I've hade the same symptom after switching back to KDE 3.5. Seems like kdm and kdm-4 isn't quite compatible.
Try something like:

sudo apt-get remove kdm-4
sudo apt-get --reinstall install kdm
sudo echo /usr/bin/kdm > /etc/X11/default-display-manager

Hope that helps...

[Nesnej]

Re: kdm/X freezes at logout

Nope, that didn't work. I did try out KDE4 (horrible experience, to be honest) but this problem started before that. It seems like none of these transitions have ever gone quite as they should after the updater crashed back when I upgraded to Feisty. Maybe I'll just try a installing from scratch instead.

[bmccosar]

Re: kdm/X freezes at logout

Honestly, in the past week, I have encountered three different flavors of this problem on three different computers. On the first, I needed to add the following line to /etc/modules:

apm power_off=1

(see the original solution post.)

On the second, a laptop, the ati driver has a new, annoying daemon named atieventsd. I had to become 'init.d assassin' to get rid of the problem:

sudo /usr/sbin/update-rc.d -f atieventsd remove

(see the original solution post)

On the third ... who knows? The problem is really sporadic, and generally happens on logging out to switch users, not shutting down.