[gentoo-user] kdm: can't login and start KDE

[Yuri K. Shatroff]

Hello gentoo-users,

Yesterday I completed a world update (amd64, unstable) and now I can't 
login with kdm.
(I have kdm set as display manager in /etc/conf.d/xdm, and started from 
default runlevel)
After booting, the login screen appears as usual. I type login/password 
and then a glimpse of X's default x-shaped pointer on black background 
appears, returning to the login screen.
I don't get any sensible errors, neither in kdm.log nor in messages, all 
I see is:

[/var/log/kdm.log]
-----------------------------
klauncher(21958) kdemain: No DBUS session-bus found. Check if you have 
started the DBUS server.
kdeinit4: Communication error with launcher. Exiting!
kdmgreet(21952)/kdecore (K*TimeZone*): KSystemTimeZones: ktimezoned 
initialize() D-Bus call failed:  "Not connected to D-Bus server"

kdmgreet(21952)/kdecore (K*TimeZone*): No time zone information obtained 
from ktimezoned
-----------------------------

But I guess this is unrelated, since dbus is running (and restarting it 
doesn't help, nor does restarting xdm)

Each time login fails I also see this in
[/var/log/messages]
-----------------------------
Apr  9 11:33:53 localhost kdm: :0[20396]: pam_unix(kde:session): session 
opened for user yks by (uid=0)
Apr  9 11:33:54 localhost kdm: :0[20396]: pam_unix(kde:session): session 
closed for user yks
-----------------------------

No other logs appear to change.

Needless to say that kdm 4.10.1 and earlier worked properly, and no 
configuration files were changed during the last update.

As a workaround, I just typed startx on the console (with startkde in 
.xinitrc) and KDE started up, so I assume the problem is somewhere 
around kdm.

Any ideas?

P.S. I had no problem with networking and udev which got updated from 
197-r9 to 200 and the network interface name didn't change from eth0 
(the 80-*rules file was a regular file full of commented text)

-- 
Best wishes,
Yuri K. Shatroff