Odd Gnome desktop login behavior

[houseworkshy]

I agree. I'm about to ditch the whole op and reinstall ( the same op, love ubuntu ). It looks like wine may be a potential security problem to me. As it happens if I have been ripped off all they will have got is some badly writen short stories but if I did banking online ......hummm. Did your tiger report look ok? Probably worth knowing if tiger has known issues before hassling the security chaps and maybe casting doubt on wine which may have nothing to do with it.

[warfacegod]

I agree. I'm about to ditch the whole op and reinstall ( the same op, love ubuntu ). It looks like wine may be a potential security problem to me. As it happens if I have been ripped off all they will have got is some badly writen short stories but if I did banking online ......hummm. Did your tiger report look ok? Probably worth knowing if tiger has known issues before hassling the security chaps and maybe casting doubt on wine which may have nothing to do with it.

tiger got stuck. No such file or directory initramsomething. So I killed it. I write poetry and lyrics, of a ridiculously insane nature to be sure.

[houseworkshy]

Cool another writer I do poetry/lyrics as well as prose, though my genius has not yet been recognised. Well I'll post a link in the security forums and see what they make of it. I'll also bung on the post I first wrote when the "mystery game" did the password thing without saying what the game was, for the reasons mentioned above, to be complete. I should probably have done that first. I can't remember half of what I did when that problem was fresh in my mind.

[warfacegod]

Cool another writer I do poetry/lyrics as well as prose, though my genius has not yet been recognised. Well I'll post a link in the security forums and see what they make of it. I'll also bung on the post I first wrote when the "mystery game" did the password thing without saying what the game was, for the reasons mentioned above, to be complete. I should probably have done that first. I can't remember half of what I did when that problem was fresh in my mind.

I recognize my own genius all the time.

[houseworkshy]

I've called the game wingame as if it is a security risk I don't want to post its' name on a public forum. This is what I wrote when it was fresh in my mind, but didn't post, after the first password changing error. It hadn't occured to me to simply not to mention the name of game. I was a bit fazed at the time.

"First off this is not a complete report as I'm not that knowledgeable, especially with the 9.10 version of Ubuntu , and I didn't realise the problem until it was too late. It is highly probable I just did something idiotic. Also I'm a little peeved and in the mood for a rant, feel free to skip to the last paragraph which is where the kicker is. Didn't want to post at all really but thought I'd better. Bearing that in mind here goes.

I'd had some problems with 9.10 but have persevered and via several false starts and reinstalls can now make it all work except for a bit of stalling in video and making libdvd css persist through reboots. The latter two problems I can live with and are for some other thread, it's not what this one is about. Yesterday I'd reinstalled, updated, and put in a few of the the extras I like. I'll mention them in case it matters; nvidia driver, restricted extras, the rest of open office, scribus, inkscape, gimp gap, kdenlive, audacity, clamtk, firestarter, kompozer, python 3.1 with appropriate IDLE. I'd also put some add ons into firefox; add to search bar, downthemall, noscript and Ghostery. The later may be significant as clamAV said that it was a virus. That was as far as I'd got, bar a few snippets from the internet archive to test my codecs and a couple of manuals which I like to have in my documents and all had worked, including through reboots. I hadn't quite finished when a friend called round.

He's a windows games enthusiast and off line, just as well perhaps because he is on the now unsupported XP. I often let him browse the net to find out how to fix his system again, and download sysinternal type freeware, patches and mods for his games add ilk and then burn them to a disc for when he gets home. I've also given him 8.04lts with an aptoncd disc ( we have identical hardware ) and lots of debs but I doubt he'll ever use them, so no need for that old discussion again.

Well this time he was very keen for me to see a wingame so I could compare it to a lingame which I'd shown him some time ago. I resisted, as I like to have open source only software, bar the obvious drivers and extras. I certainly didn't want the thing, as a writer I respect intellectual property. Even if I didn't what's the point of stripping naked to wash in the town square fountain and upsetting people when you've got a perfectly good bathroom at home with soap and hot water. In the end, reasoning that he had paid for and owned the thing so it was hardly piracy and probably, to be honest, because I liked the prospect of saying “and hey look you can still run most of those old windows games you've got on Linux.” I relented.

So I put in wine, the stable version, unplugged the internet in case it tried to tie the game to my machine. I remember ms don't always ask about feedback. As he isn't on line and so hasn't been able register it himself, it might muck things up for him when he finally gets his own connection. It may even mean that one of us would have to buy another copy, not me as we'd both say, if he wanted to use it on line. This would be a bit much as he's mad on the thing and I doubt I'd ever play it, too steep a learning curve for an occasional gamer such as myself. That's not intended as a criticism btw it's just that if I'm going to invest that much time in learning something I'd rather it was an application, such as blender which is next on my recreational list after python. Different people use pc's for different things, that's all.

I opened the setup.exe with wine for him and let him get on with it. I could have made a mistake there as it was an old version, and perhaps I should have set wine to be running as 2000 or even 98 instead of leaving the default xp. Everything else was default too, just as it is when freshly installed from the repro's. I don't remember the game version, it may even have been the first. The disk is legitimate and from a reputable retailer, it was an expensive one at the time it came out, which is when he got it. It ran but insisted on full screen mode. I've never liked or trusted programs which prevent you from getting at anything else while they run. The graphics looked a bit old school to me in its default of 800x600 I think, it may even have been the one below that, so we put them up to 1050x1680 at which my fussy lcd monitor complained, which was odd as it was the converse of what I'd expect. So we put them back and my monitor decided that it didn't like the original resolution either any more. Once the monitors grumble box vanished we took off and crashed. Then the program crashed too. Can't pretend I was that impressed. The loading bar was nice though; it used a picture instead of being plain.

This is where it gets odd. I couldn't get out of wine. Fortunately Alt+F2 worked. I used it to open the system monitor but couldn't end the process. On using Alt+F2, the screen went back to low res maximised and I got the graphics of Ubuntu's tool bars back but couldn't use them. I had a look at the files and it seemed to be doing a lot of piping etc/dev was one of them which is understandable, but there was far too much else, which I can't remember now, going on. Didn't like the look of that at all so tried to kill the process, nope. So then I opened a terminal and “sudo shutdown -r now” and thanks for all the fish.

Now comes what I regard as serious and why felt I had to post. The game/wine combination had changed my password. I tried half a dozen times and am sure I made no typing errors and caps lock was just as it should be. No go. The only sudo's used in the episode was one when installing wine and the final one to reboot. I hadn't used the pass phrase option when I'd set up but as I hadn't got any work on the drive yet anyway it didn't matter so I just reinstalled 9.10 again. I'm sorry that I don't have more information but I didn't expect to have to do a diagnostic. I still have a dusty pile of old windows games CD's and floppy's, just in case I feel nostalgic, but don't want to replicate the circumstances nor do I have the time. I've used wine before to run celestia so I can put extra maps and textures on its virtual c drive rather than use sudo to paste them elsewhere and also to play the spiderweb demos and it has never given me trouble before. That said I don't think it was in 9.10. Perhaps someone with the necessary bits and knowledge may like to dig further and find out if it was some passing cosmic wave or whether wine can mess with permissions and change the Ubuntu system password."

[houseworkshy]

I recognize my own genius all the time.

We all do when we are actually writing. Then we usually hate it and regret all the people we showed it to when it was fresh and then, a few months later when its' cold can actually see whether it was any good or not.
I'll just pop over to the other forum section now and point at this.

[warfacegod]

We all do when we are actually writing. Then we usually hate it and regret all the people we showed it to when it was fresh and then, a few months later when its' cold can actually see whether it was any good or not.
I'll just pop over to the other forum section now and point at this.

My genius does not fade with time. Apparently, neither does my ego.

[houseworkshy]

Not a bad thing, without ego one would just give up. I've posted the link so other than maybe pming an expert with the name of the game that's it. I'll reinstall after this. First I suppose I'd better add the sysinfo in case it helps.
System information report, generated by Sysinfo: 01/02/2010 04:24:05
http://sourceforge.net/projects/gsysinfo

SYSTEM INFORMATION
Running Ubuntu Linux, the 5.0 release.
GNOME: 2.26.1 (Ubuntu 2009-05-06)
Kernel version: 2.6.28-17-generic (#58-Ubuntu SMP Tue Dec 1 21:27:25 UTC 2009)
GCC: 4.3.3 (x86_64-linux-gnu)
Xorg: unknown (09 April 2009 02:11:54AM)
Hostname: desktop
Uptime: 0 days 3 h 28 min

CPU INFORMATION
AuthenticAMD, AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4200+
Number of CPUs: 2
CPU clock currently at 2210.255 MHz with 512 KB cache
Numbering: family(15) model(75) stepping(2)
Bogomips: 4420.51
Flags: fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 ht syscall nx mmxext fxsr_opt rdtscp lm 3dnowext 3dnow rep_good pni cx16 lahf_lm cmp_legacy svm extapic cr8_legacy

MEMORY INFORMATION
Total memory: 1860 MB
Total swap: 5443 MB

STORAGE INFORMATION
SCSI device - scsi0
Vendor: ATA
Model: ST3250820AS
SCSI device - scsi1
Vendor: TSSTcorp
Model: CDDVDW SH-S223B
SCSI device - scsi2
Vendor: ATA
Model: ST3250820AS

HARDWARE INFORMATION
MOTHERBOARD
Host bridge
Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Miscellaneous Control
PCI bridge(s)
nVidia Corporation MCP61 PCI bridge (rev a1) (prog-if 01)
nVidia Corporation MCP61 PCI Express bridge (rev a2)
nVidia Corporation MCP61 PCI Express bridge (rev a2)
nVidia Corporation MCP61 PCI Express bridge (rev a2)
USB controller(s)
nVidia Corporation MCP61 USB Controller (rev a2) (prog-if 10)
nVidia Corporation MCP61 USB Controller (rev a2) (prog-if 20)
ISA bridge
nVidia Corporation MCP61 LPC Bridge (rev a2)
Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Device 8234
IDE interface
nVidia Corporation MCP61 SATA Controller (rev a2) (prog-if 85 [Master SecO PriO])
Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Device 8234

GRAPHIC CARD
VGA controller
nVidia Corporation GeForce 6150SE nForce 430 (rev a2)
Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Device 8234

SOUND CARD
Multimedia controller
nVidia Corporation MCP61 High Definition Audio (rev a2)
Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Device 8234

NETWORK

NVIDIA GRAPHIC CARD INFORMATION
Model name: GeForce 6150SE nForce 430
Card Type: PCI
Video RAM: 512 MB
GPU Frequency: 425 MHz
Driver version: NVIDIA UNIX x86_64 Kernel Module 180.44 Tue Mar 24 05:46:32 PST 2009

On the first two occasions I was using 9.10, after that 9.04.

Well that's that. Reinstallation time. Thanks for your help and good luck with the writing.