gdm crashes switching user. former "endless drumbeats" thread.

[NoOp]

On 02/02/2010 03:33 PM, Vitorio Okio wrote:
> I'd better open a new thread, since the endless drumbeats I complained is 
> just an audible symptom of a dipper problem.
> 
> Lately I had 2 problems appeared after almost 2 years of running Hardy on 
> Asus P4PE with ATI Radeon 9550. Both problems showed up infrequently, 
> about 1-2 times a month and did not look related at first.
> 
> 1. Sometimes I could get an endless drumbeats sound after switching a 
> user and a subsequent successful login.
> 
> 2. Sometimes in a middle of a session my monitor could get black with "no 
> signal" message on it.  The only way out of it was a reboot. 
> 
> Troubleshooting the second problem I found an odd problem with Xorg-ati 
> driver: "direct rendering" was Off with a very low frame rate. 
> Reinstalling driver related packages seemingly fixed things.
> 
> Today, after I logout the second user and get login myself I run 
> glxgears, just to check, and found the problem was back: no "direct 
> rendering" and low frame rate.
> 
> System log showed gdm running at the background in an loop attempting to 
> login using user name "unknown" (?) and reporting "Writing failed session 
> attempt utmp-wtmp record" endlessly. This was certainly providing with 
> the damn drumbeats.
> 
> Again, at this point a session for the second user was closed and I was 
> successfully login.
> 
> Any links that could help, any suggestions folks? Unfortunately I was not 
> able to find anything really useful so far.
> 
> 

You might try searching through these to see if you can narrow down to a
similar bug/issue:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gdm