On Saturday 05 February 2011 20:10:31 Alan McKinnon wrote:
> Apparently, though unproven, at 02:54 on Saturday 05 February 2011, Grant
> did
> 
> opine thusly:
> > >> Yesterday I caught up with portage and updated quite a few packages on
> > >> a remote workstation.  The system hadn't been updated for about a
> > >> month.  The updates included some xorg stuff and some xfce4 stuff.
> > >> Today when the workstation's user logged in via gdm, she clicked the
> > >> xfce4 "Migrate Config" option, something weird happened, and she ended
> > >> up back on the gdm welcome screen.  Now whenever she logs is via gdm,
> > >> the screen immediately goes black and she is routed back to the gdm
> > >> welcome screen again.  When I have grsecurity enabled I get this in
> > >> dmesg:
> > >> 
> > >> Segmentation fault occurred at 000068e453633fdc in
> > >> /usr/bin/Xorg[X:4777] uid/euid:0/0 gid/egid:0/0, parent
> > >> /usr/sbin/gdm-binary[gdm:4775] uid/euid:0/0 gid/egid:1010/1002
> > > 
> > > When you upgraded x.org, did you also rebuild it's drivers?
> > 
> > I rebuilt nv but not evdev.  Could that be responsible for this?  I'm
> > not sure how since the gdm welcome screen comes up and the keyboard
> > works fine there for username/password input.
> 
> I only mention it because in my experience I always have weird shit
> happening when I upgrade xorg-server over a big version number change.
> 
> And rebuilding everything that underpins xorg always fixes it. Including
> drivers and mesa.
> 
> In the old days when xorg was monolithic this never happened, as all the
> drivers always got rebuilt anyway. Nowadays with xorg sources being
> modular, we have to be a little more alert.

... and if you have just upgraded to xorg-server-1.9 you'll (probably) need an 
xorg.conf file.  The old .fdi files are no longer being used.
-- 
Regards,
Mick