Black screen FreeNX/NX

I have been running my FreeNX for several years with no problem then all of a sudden I tried to log in today and I received a black screen. After several searches I found out that it’s a problem with the window manager temporary files being corrupt. Just to test I changed the settings on my nx client to use another window manager “KDE” in the system and it worked. To resolve the issue I SSHed into the box and deleted all gconfd, orbit and mapping tmp folders/files for the affected user. Tried to reconnect again and it worked.

4 Replies to “Black screen FreeNX/NX”

  1. Hi

    I am having a similar problem KDE sessions are working but gnome session are not.

    Can you please elaborate on “SSHed into the box and deleted all gconfd, orbit and mapping tmp folders/files for the affected user.” I quite a newbie.

  2. Just sign on to the machine you are having trouble connecting to and delete all files in /tmp/orbit-gdm/*, /tmp/orbit-“user”/* -user is the user you are trying to log in as, /tmp/gconfd/* – this is folder distributions with older gnome current versions of gnome don’t have this folder anymore.
    Hope this works for you.

  3. I tried your way, but i still can not login with FreeNX.
    the funny thing is some person in my team can login in, some people can not.
    I checked the /tmp folder, when people who can login in, there will be orbit-* folders for them; for those people can’t login, there will be no orbit-* folders

  4. @HJKing I have never run across your particular situation. From what I understand the orbit stuff is used by Gnome. So anytime a user logs into gnome the orbit folder for that user will get populated or created if it’s not there.
    For the users who can’t log in are they local users to that system, check if you see their usernames under /home. I hope this helps, let me know how things work out.

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