XF4.2.1 broke everything-?

[RioFL]

I installed one machine last week using portage .38 which installed xf4.2.0 and everything works perfectly except for one small detail! I wanted to clone that machine this week on my good machine, and wound up getting different versions of almost everything and very little works right in the X dept. I am going to itemize my questions in this one msg rather than write several:

1. I solved the compile prob with Xft.h by using the 4.2.0 header as recommended by someone else. It worked fine. Kde loaded and everything worked. I then emerged Gnome and it will not load unless I use the failsafe gnome. There must be a problem somewhere in the startup scripts? The failsafe Gnome works quite well. I don't even know where the startup scripts for gnome are so I can't comment calls out one by one to find the problem.

2. I did an emerge sync and got the kdebase-3.0.4-r2 'fix' for the Xft.h problem. That went well until the end. The compile blew up on a missing startup-something-r2. However Kde does load fine and appears to work ok. Gnome still had the same behavior though, which is for the gnome spalsh screen to show up, with no text activity in the little bar at the bottom of the image, and it leaves and returns to the manager, kdm or gdm. Failsafe works. I tried updating fontconfig to the 2.0-r2 version but no change. In working with the fonts menu selection , I see that maybe 1/3 of the fonts listed do not work and show garbage in the preview window. Unfortunately this machine is the one that needed to be fully configured and rock stable by saturday. One more interesting symptom. Using XNest to open a new gnome session inside the first one, gnome will load without selecting failsafe yet it won't load directly from gdm or even from startx. The $WINDOWMANAGER environment var is set to /usr/bin/metalcity.

3. On the first machine with XF4.2.0, gdm cannot authenticate any user at all. It comes back with an invalid login message. so gdm cannot be used to load gnome which disables xnest if kdm is used:( Any clues why gdm won't authenticate? Did I miss installing a package? Kdm authenticates fine.

Somehow I get the feeling I am missing something simple here. Oh, my X configuration for the second machine is 1280x1024 using a creative graphics blaster (RIVATNT) and the nv driver (which i need to figure out how to set dga for). The NVidia driver will not work with this card unless I downgrade resolution to 1024x768. The first machine is 3dfx and loads properly.

I think at this point I am rambling, its 1am. Most of you will probably grasp what I am asking in these questions and probably point to some simple solution:) (i hope.. otherwise im going to remove all X components, kde and gnome, and downgrade portage to 0.38 and make a new system from it.)

Chuck

[entity]

maybe this will help https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?p=108562