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Microsoft Word - Microsoft Office 2013 stopped working on Windows 8 computer after a year - says it can't find my license

Microsoft Word - Microsoft Office 2013 stopped working on Windows 8 computer after a year - says it can't find my license

Microsoft Office 2013 stopped working on Windows 8 computer after a year - says it can't find my license

Posted: 16 Mar 2014 03:28 PM PDT

My copy of Microsoft Office 2013 stopped working today, more than a year after it was installed on my computer. Although it has been balky from time to time during that year, it has mostly worked fine. I am able to open Word and Excel, but as soon as I type a character, I receive the following message:

Microsoft Office can't find your license for this application. A repair attempt was unsuccessful or was cancelled. Microsoft Office will now exit.

This message is followed by two check-boxes, one for "OK," the other for "Help." Clicking Help brings up this Microsoft Community page. Outlook also shows this same message. My software was provided by my employer, and I have contacted our IT department to see if anyone else has experienced this problem. I am waiting for a response from them.

In a probably unconnected incident, yesterday morning I received a bizarre phone call on my cell phone from someone with a very strong Indian accent (almost impossible to understand what he was saying), telling me my computer had been hacked and that I needed to turn on my computer immediately so he could walk me through the process of repair. He said that if I didn't do so, I would lose all my data! He represented himself as part of the company (could not understand the company name) who was responsible for Microsoft repairs. I had never heard of such an arrangement, and told him I would have to call him back. He was so insistent and urgent I put the call on speakerphone so my husband could listen in. He finally gave me a phone number and his name ("James Smith" - too funny). Can't imagine a link between my cell phone number and my computer, but it is possible I used that phone number when registering some product at some time. At any event I did not call back, and then this morning when I turned on my laptop for the first time after receiving the call, had the above-mentioned issue with my Office products.  Has anyone else had a similar call, or are you aware of any relationship between Microsoft and an outside company in which that company would legitimately call a Microsoft customer to report and repair a problem previously undiscovered by the user?

Thank you for any comments and help you can provide.

Show certain text in TOC

Posted: 16 Mar 2014 03:14 PM PDT

Fellow Sufferers

The people in my organisation love the TOC. It allows them to easily jump to a topic in the text.

Now, I have certain tables which contain important values in the first column. It could be e.g. the chapter "Per Capita Income", and the first column of the table "Per Capita Income by Country" within that chapter might contain all the countries  - the second column cound then be the actual Per Capita Income of each country. I would like those countries to show in the TOC (although they are just in normal text in the table). That way, from the TOC I can jump diractly to, say, Germany and see how much they are making.

If you can help me, Ill be very gratefull!

Thanks in advance!!!

Best wishes, Peter B Hansen

How would I create a fillable form that can auto fill select information?

Posted: 16 Mar 2014 02:15 PM PDT

Hello everybody,

I am trying to simplify a procedure in my workplace.  When certain purchase orders are written there is certain information that needs to be placed in multiple places.  It would save about 10 minutes per P.O. if we were able to enter the information once and have Word take care of the rest.  I can't seem to figure this out.  Are there any video tutorials or written instruction on how to do this?n  My version is 2010 and the office version is 2007, both on Windows 7.

Thanks

Modify Show Markup group settings in Word 2013

Posted: 16 Mar 2014 01:55 PM PDT

I tried to write a VBA macro to modify the settings in the Show Markup group in the Review Tab in the Ribbon of Word 2013 running on Windows 8.1.:


Sub ShowMarkups ()
With ActiveWindow.View.RevisionsFilter
  .Markup = wdRevisionsMarkupAll
  .View = wdRevisionsViewFinal
End With
End Sub

Unfortunately, the macro copied above only modifies the Display for Review group, but not the Show Markup group. Thus, if the user had manually unchecked e.g. Insertions and Deletions or Formatting in the Show Markup group, those settings are not changed by the macro. It seems that the settings in Show Markup have precedence over those in Display for Review.

Do you have any idea how to modify the settings in the Show Markup group with VBA code? I started the Macro Recorder when I manually modified these settings - however, nothing was displayed in the macro code!

Many thanks for your suggestions

Peter

Attaching a PDF to an Email from My Documents

Posted: 16 Mar 2014 01:21 PM PDT

I cannot attach a PDF document to an email when I try to do it in Microsoft Word. I keep getting a message saying there is no email program attached and to go into my Default Programs and select my program.  I have gone into my Default Programs and made sure Windows Live Mail is selected as the default program (because you can't select Outlook) but it still doesn't work.  I was able to do this up until a few months ago and then something changed but I don't know what. Can anyone explain.  It seems I have been running into all sorts of issues in different places ever since Explorer 11 was installed.

How do I move the text pane?

Posted: 16 Mar 2014 12:07 PM PDT

I'm learning Word 2013 with training videos and like to keep the videos in the right/bottom right to follow along while the video takes place. In Word 2010, I could decrease the zoom to ~80% and the text pane would move to the left automatically, which allowed me to edit the exercise files on the left and view the videos at the same time on the right. In '13, I've only seen options to change the page size and decrease the height of the pane by double clicking on the top or bottom. Also, I'd rather not have to use multiple pages.

Thanks

Insertion of page numbers using Ctrl-F9 no longer working

Posted: 16 Mar 2014 12:01 PM PDT

Hi,

I have been adding page numbers to my documents for years by positioning the cursor where I want the page number and pressing Ctrl-F9 to insert a field, entering PAGE, and then updating the field. This suddenly and inexplicably stopped working yesterday. Now, F9 does nothing, Ctrl-F9 does nothing. I've tried to research this online but I can't find anything helpful. This is very important to me and I'm totally stuck. What could have happened, and how can I get this important functionality back?

Thanks!

Matt

Print Envelopes w/Windows 2010

Posted: 16 Mar 2014 11:59 AM PDT

I have installed Office and Home Business 2010 on my Dell Laptop.

My printer is an HP Photosmart 6520.

I am trying to print individual envelopes.

What tray do I use?  If my envelope is in the photo tray or main tray it will not print anything.

If I have standard letter in the main tray it will print on that, which is no use to me.

Can anyone help?

thanks,

Barb

Large fonts have equal amounts of wasted white space above and below.

Posted: 16 Mar 2014 11:00 AM PDT

When I create a label or directory merge using a line of #11 font and a second line of #130 font in a table (Ring Chart for Obedience dog show), it doesn't fit.  The font includes wasted white space above and below the character equal to about half the height of the font.  It is not affected by any line or paragraph spacing controls.   I currently have to use Word Art for the Armband number but I can't put a merge field in there (unless there is a secret trick) so I have to make those numbers by hand.  How can I get rid of the wasted white space?

Ex:

Golden Retriever       22/44

                  95

change default fonts in Word 2013 on Windows 8.1 platform

Posted: 16 Mar 2014 05:21 AM PDT

I have (Office) Word2013 installed on Windows 8.1 and I want to change my default colibri font permantently and not have to reset it every time I open a document.   Also, I need to use "Perpetua" font on some documents, but it is not listed in the default fonts.   Can I import it ?

Font Color - Company Custom Colors

Posted: 16 Mar 2014 04:55 AM PDT

Is it possible to customise the font color picker in Word 2010 to a company's colors only. I am aware of styles, themes and setting restrictions. We don't want to show the gradient colour options and if possible would like more than 10 color options. 

Any suggestions would be welcome. 

Thank you 

Kelly

Microsoft Word

Posted: 16 Mar 2014 01:51 AM PDT

My lumia 625 does not support Office 99-2003 or Office 2007 files. I neither can open these files attached with email nor the files saved in memory card. Nokia support center also could not give me proper answer.

Microsoft Office 2013 customisation

Posted: 16 Mar 2014 12:32 AM PDT

1. Where are the image files stored for the Office Backgrounds? I wish to use the ones I have manually created in Photoshop with my suite even if it involves manually inserting pngs into a DLL.

2. Is there a registry tweak to re-enable "More Ink Colours"? I don't really want to have to change the ink colour every time so it pops up in Recent Colours.

3. My shortcuts assigned to subscript and superscript do not function when I am inserting a formulae and I have to manually click to insert superscripts/subscripts. Is there a way to assign them to a shortcut?

Word document - auto recovery didn't save what I needed

Posted: 15 Mar 2014 11:18 PM PDT

I was working on an essay, and my computer restarted to make updates and I wasn't paying attention and the autorecovered file I got when it turned on again was a version from 2 days ago, rather than showing the updates I had made since then(which is weird because it's set to auto save every 10 minutes).

Anyways, it's not the end of the world that I lost some of it but if I could get it back that would definitely be more favorable, lol. I looked under "manage versions" but there was nothing available. Could anyone give me any help or should I just accept it's gone and give up.

Thanks,

Monica

Edit: I tried to do a system restore, but it said it's set to not effect documents and I don't know how to change that setting! Would that work?

Word 2013 automatically saves as "document1"

Posted: 15 Mar 2014 10:39 PM PDT

I have Office Home & Student 2013 on cloud and it automatically saves documents as "document1" or "document2."  I want to be able to name the document myself rather than the program naming it for me, how do I get around this?  Also, if I open a blank document it will automatically save it even if there is nothing on it, is there a way to prevent this?

WKS files

Posted: 15 Mar 2014 08:29 PM PDT

I have just bought a new computer with Windows 8 unfortunately. Anyway I have loads of important files which are mostly WKS from I believe Microsoft word and most of them worked OK on Windows 7. I tried to transfer them with Skydrive and Onedrive. None of my files will open in Windows 8 so I found an app on Windows 8  that claimed to open outdated files but that turned out to be a complete disaster as all it seemed to download was programmes like Reg Clean Pro, Search Protect and JDI Backup which are all programmes which are very difficult to uninstall and are not wanted. I cannot understand why Microsoft promote an app which seems to download corrupt programmes. Anyway does anyone know how I can restore these old files.?

Bob

Enabling keyboard layout in Word 2013 with Win 8.1

Posted: 15 Mar 2014 05:35 PM PDT

New computer, updated to 8.1 and added office 365. Downloaded Spanish language pack and installed it.  Trying to enable the Spanish keyboard layout and run into problems:

I click on the "not enabled" and get the language options screen from control panel.  Under input method, it shows US,  Latin American and add an input method.  When I check preview, I see that the Latin American is the proper layout.  I click save and return to word options, language screen and the spanish is still "not enabled".

So, in 25 words or less, please tell me what I'm missing!!

Re windows 7 64 bit - Word and Excel will not open

Posted: 15 Mar 2014 04:43 PM PDT

I am running Office 2010 and I seem to have lost Word and Excel. When I try to open either one I get an error message telling me that they can't be opened and it further tells me to try "Product Repair" in control panel. It has been a while since I used Word and Excel so I don't know when the problem arose. I have tried system restore and the repair disc that I created when I bought the computer. I can't work out how to do a product repair in control panel. Any help would be very much appreciated.

Multiple sessions (distinct users on the same machine at the sametime) - Forums Linux

Multiple sessions (distinct users on the same machine at the sametime) - Forums Linux

Multiple sessions (distinct users on the same machine at the sametime)

Posted: 07 Jan 2006 04:27 AM PST

kermit <com> wrote: 
 

I'm not sure what you mean - the DISPLAY variable (or -display arg)
controls addressing of an X server by an X application Are you saying
that you don't know if the value should be "0:0" or "1:0"?

(I don't know either, not having the problem :-).


Peter

I/O access over LAN

Posted: 07 Jan 2006 01:28 AM PST

On 01/07/06 10:28, BlueGecko wrote: 

You need some hardware/software to manage everything.
Take a look at < http://www.ltsp.org/ >

Ciao
Giovanni
--
A computer is like an air conditioner,
it stops working when you open Windows.
Registered Linux user #337974 <http://counter.li.org/>

CygwinX

Posted: 05 Jan 2006 08:31 PM PST


"Ken K" <headfog.com> wrote in message
news:IfFvf.5574$..
 

Good. Distinctly up to date versions are available at www.sunfreeware.com: I
find Sun's official releases of software to often lag way, way, way behind
the latest FSF or other open source releases, especially including SSH.

Getting the Suns to play nice with the Linux systems is often quite a lot of
fun, especially because the Linux version of NIS is so much better to work
with.

KVM Switch - Dual Display (DVI) + USB + Audio; 2-port

Posted: 05 Jan 2006 10:31 AM PST


<net> wrote in message
news:googlegroups.com... 
No, it stays DVI the whole way. If you want to convert, you have to add a
DVA-VGA adapter.
 
It all goes through the same bilateral switches. The cable set includes
audio in. The only extra connectors on the box, are the USB ones, and the
audio 'out'. I got mine from kvmdirect.com, and they were able to supply
the correct cable sets. The only problem is that after this unit, Belkin,
then launched the 'DD' version, which supports lower sync rates cheaper.
This had problems, and is currently 'withdrawn', so finding the right unit
and cables, requires talking to a company that knows the Belkin products
better than Belkin do...
 

Best Wishes

define: assertion(heads <256) at disk_dos.c:486 in function probe_partition_for_geon() failed

Posted: 05 Jan 2006 03:49 AM PST


Enrique Perez-Terron wrote: 

thanks a lot...both of u...well..i was installing fedora3 on a disk
which had windows installed on it beforehand..as soon as anaconda
started, i started receving those messages..after ignoring a number of
them over different steps i finally got the disk formatted but the
linux box is running very slow..opening a window on the desktop takes a
long time

me.linuxadmin

Desparate to recover from my stupid mistake with mkdosfs.

Posted: 05 Jan 2006 02:38 AM PST

Miha Verlic wrote:
 


Acronis has a nice tool that works too.

Building a file server - advice please

Posted: 04 Jan 2006 05:09 AM PST

Okay.

Thank you to everyone who has responded. I've had a long chat with Nigel
about what he actually wants, and combined that with what you guys have
suggested.

I've managed to persuade him to free off 1 of the 250gb drives, so that
one along with the 300gb and the 40gb will be going into the new machine
as fixed drives.

The other two 250gb drives he wants to be able to swap out of the linux
box and into his 'doze box. These two therefore I cannot reformat. They'll
have to stay as ntfs discs.

So. If I use the 40gb drive for my /boot / and swap partitions, and then
somehow use lvm for the 300gb and single reformatted 250gb to form my
/home partition. Can I then get a SATAII card to drive the two NTFS discs
so that they can be hot-swapped out?

I've tried to read up on SATA and I'm still a bit hazy on one point. Can I
use the existing 250gb IDE drives with a SATA card? He won't buy any new
hardware beyond a card, SATA, IDE, whatever, to enable him to have all
five drives available all at the same time, but if the SATAII will allow
him to hot swap the IDE drives, then he'll get one for his 'doze machine
as well.

Many thanks,

Dave

--
Dave Stratford ZFCA
http://daves.orpheusweb.co.uk/
Hexagon Systems Limited - Experts in VME systems development

LINUX Server Reboot Frequency

Posted: 03 Jan 2006 06:21 PM PST


"Enrique Perez-Terron" <no> wrote in message
news:home.lan...
 

And what does "free" say? Or /proc/meminfo, when doing such large
allocations? OK, so you'd have to do an allocation large enough to go past
the system RAM and get into swap to really see it happen. But as I
understand it, that memory is still relegated to that program, and is
available *for that program*. At least, that's how I remember building
stacks from scratch: if someone's invented a way to actually release it to
the system instead of merely for that program's use in its own stack, I'm
going to be *VERY* surprised.

And in fact, you can even get away with doing that for quite a while: the
memory allocated will wind up being heavily in swap, and if it's not
actually being used for much, most of it will be swapped out at any given
time.
 

OK, that makes more sense: by freeing up unused stuff off what is
effectively the end of the stack, that could work for releasing the
resources.
 

Who knows? It's closed source, very proprietary, multi-platform, and clearly
written for big iron, not casual implementation by any means. Using its own
memory management makes sense, but at some point you sort of *have* to talk
to glibc unless you want to rewrite a lot of very, very basic functions from
scratch.

Just want to create a bootable CD!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Posted: 03 Jan 2006 12:18 PM PST

James Kimble wrote: 
Here's the overview, it's really not hard. The BIOS will only boot off a
floppy (image), so on the CD or DVD there's a floppy image, the 2.88MB
flavor in most cases. You can roll your own, or D/L the Slackware
install disk and use that.

Copy the floppy image to a file, loop mount it...
mount -o loop flpimg.dat /mnt/temp
now cd to it and edit the startup scripts, etc.

Opinion: I like Slack better than SYSLINUX, I used it for years, I ran
BSD at one time, and it's totally easy to understand and edit.

When you're done, run mkisofs with the -b option (READ the man page!) to
create the CD.

AFAIK there is no general purpose software to do this, most are special
purpose, like mondo, and at least the old version, on which I gave up,
really didn't want to be general purpose. If you write a tool, please
make it human readable, no XML, no GUI, understandable config, etc.

--
bill davidsen
SBC/Prodigy Yorktown Heights NY data center
http://newsgroups.news.prodigy.com

SuSE 10.0 Install problems

Posted: 03 Jan 2006 10:25 AM PST


Jim Castle wrote: 

have you ever used Maxblast setup tools on that 120GB HDD ?
You likely have a non-standard partition table byte set.
Suggest you zero out the disk prior to installation (i forget the exact
'dd' command to do this in linux, but even a FDISK /mbr from a win98
boot disk should do it) - and then wipe the unintended install on the
unintended 250GB SATA - proceed with setup onto 120GB.

GRUB Geom Error

Posted: 01 Jan 2006 07:35 AM PST


"Enrique Perez-Terron" <no> wrote in message
news:home.lan... 

I like Enrique. He actually gives useful answers. Michael? What were you
doing just *before* that reboot? Anything that would touch the disks, or
modify grub settings, like manipulating your partitions from Windows or
Linux?

Xorg.conf

Posted: 01 Jan 2006 06:40 AM PST

On Tue, 03 Jan 2006 21:41:49 +0100, jon <co.uk> wrote:
 

I fully inderstand your statement that something is wrong, if you set the
some bounds for the refresh rate, and X does something else.

Now that it appears confirmed that there is a problem, and that there
does not seem to be a way to make X behave as specified, given the
default modes, the question is 1) is it possible to write a custom mode,
and 2) how serious is it for the monitor to be driven faster than the
recommended rate.

I guess that it is not a problem for the hardware, but that the higher
rate gives the crystals little time to turn, and some visual artifacts
may happen in rapidly changing scenes. But don't sue me if your
monitors goes up in flames with a POFF!

For the question of a custom modeline, I never felt the descriptions I
found were anywhere nearly clear. I did play a little with them some
years ago, and well... I think I got behaviours I could explain,
*mostly*. I don't feel assured that I had the right interpretation of
the stuff. Perhaps others here know more. If you first do some basic
reading, and try to compose a modeline and post it here. Explain how
you arrived at it, and we can probably contribute som lateral thinking.

This route may be easier, if the ATI card is so problematic (something I
have no knowledge about, positive or negative).

-Enrique

? Whats best for a newbie?

Posted: 01 Jan 2006 05:13 AM PST

Happy New Year!

On Sun, 01 Jan 2006, in the Usenet newsgroup comp.os.linux.setup, in article
<ZqRtf.242$eR.60@fed1read03>, MuNkEeSuSELV wrote:
 
 

You seem to be running some form of *nix to start with, I guess you are
asking about learning, rather than the usual "what distribution should
I use" type of question. A good answer would be "The Linux Documentation
Project". One could start here

http://ibiblio.org/pub/linux/docs/HOWTO/
http://en.tldp.org/HOWTO/HOWTO-INDEX/howtos.html

or here

http://tldp.org/guides.html

and find enough reading material to keep you busy for several weeks. Last
I looked, there were over 470 HOWTOs covering a huge number of subjects.
Relatively recent copies should have been included with your Linux distro.
There are more than 25 guides at the that are available for download if they
aren't part of your distribution. Examples would be "The Linux Network
Administrator's Guide" which is also published by O'Reilly and Assoc. for
US$40. Another example is the "solrhe" which is the first edition of
"Securing-Optimizing-Linux-RH-Edition" (version 1.3 actually talks about
Red Hat 6.2, but the concepts are unchanged - there is a commercial version
2.0 which is not free, but is more recent).
 

A few minutes at google will normally uncover more information that you
have time to read.
 

Post here - read here. Additionally, all microsoft net space is blackholed
here, and I couldn't connect even if I wanted to.

Old guy

GDM Login Screen Problem

Posted: 31 Dec 2005 08:18 PM PST

On Mon, 02 Jan 2006 03:01:11 +0100, Chen Yang <com> wrote:
 

Hm, I was wrong, I triggered on the word "audit", which occurs in the
log messages when selinux prevents something.

I just searched the gdm sources for the string AUDIT and rejected, and
none of them occurs in a string in the source. Probably the strings
come from some library used by gdm (there is 35 of them, and thre may be
more if a library calls another).

Is there any surrounding text in /var/log/gdm/:0.log? Are there other
files than :0.log* in the directory?

I suspect that gdm is capable of outputing more error messages.

First I assume that you have this line in /etc/inittab:

x:5a:once:/etc/X11/prefdm -nodaemon

In the file /etc/X11/prefdm you will find this

if [ -n "$preferred" ]; then
$preferred "$@" >/dev/null 2>&1
if [ $? -ne 127 ]; then
exec $0 "$@"
exit $?
fi
fi

Replace "/dev/null" with "/tmp/gdm.stderr".

Open a virtual terminal (Ctrl-Alt-F1), login as root and do

telinit 3; sleep 10; telinit 5

Just wait for the gdm screen to not showup. When it should have been there,
switch back to the vt1 console again. Check that the /var/log/gdm/:0.log
has the error message, and restore the original /etc/X11/prefdm.

Check if there are any more meaningfull messages in /tmp/gdm.stderr.

If this does not help, I can only suggest you use "strace" to find
out what is going on.

In /etc/X11/prefdm, change the line with /dev/null above, to:

/usr/bin/strace -o /tmp/gdm.strace -ff $preferred "$@" >/dev/null 2>&1

Open a virtual terminal (Ctrl-Alt-F1), login as root and do

telinit 3; sleep 10; telinit 5

Just wait for the gdm screen to not showup. When it should have been there,
switch back to the vt1 console again. ps-aux and note the pid of the *second*
(child) gdm. Check that the /var/log/gdm/:0.log has the error message, and
restore the original /etc/X11/prefdm. Repeat the above telinit commands. Or
just kill -2 the strace process. That should make it detach all processes.
Login the usual way (kill -1 the gdm-binary) and inspect
/tmp/gdm.strace.<pid of second gdm>. Search for AUDIT or other pieces of
the error message. Hopefully you will find something like

write(4, "AUDIT ... rejected from local host\n", 35) = 35

Then look at the lines above that line. They tell what the program was doing
before it wrote the error message. Look particularly for lines having
"= -1 E" in them like this:

connect(3, {sa_family=AF_FILE, path="/var/run/nscd/socket"}, 110) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)

There is some chance that this will reveal what is going wrong.

I am not sure if the error will be in the second gdm process. There will
probably be a host of files in /tmp, with different pids, since some of
the programs involved are shell scripts that invoke various sed and similar
commands. "grep execve /tmp/gdm.strace*" will give some indication of
what programs are run by what processes. Look for gdmgreeter-binary,
that seems a likely candidate.

-Enrique

new to Linux, where are they/how do you download files

Posted: 31 Dec 2005 04:30 PM PST

Thank you. I had downloaded a bittorrent client but that doesn't work
either. I had suspected that those files might be some sort of tracking
files, so thanks for confirming that. The only other thing I can think
of is my computer simply doesn't like those files, it's rather
mystifying. I think the most reasonable thing for me is to not even
bother figuring it out, but just have an actual C.D. mailed to me. I
wanted to get it installed over the weekend but I've alread spent half
the weekend just trying to download it.

Thanks.

X is broke... freeing multiple contexts (2)

Posted: 31 Dec 2005 02:49 PM PST

On Sat, 31 Dec 2005 23:49:01 +0100, Wayne Dernoncourt <com> wrote:
 


Trying to sum up the info with some comments:

Distro FC4
HW: Laptop, IBM Thinkpad
Ram 640 MBytes (so much? 512 + 128 ?)

Some problems with DSL, attributed to the ISP, replaced splitter.
Comment:
no details about failure modes. OK, assume laptop disconnected
in practice, i.e. failure outside laptop.

Sound card works for programs running as user, but game "blinkem"
run as root claims unable to open sound card.
Comment:
Assume for now sound card is basically OK, kernel drivers OK,
hotplug/udev stuff OK.

Could not log out as root, after playing "blinkem".
Comment:
Was this a graphical X session? a console bash session? Is "blinkem"
an X application? A framebuffer application?
No account of how "log out". Exit command in a console? Control-D?
Logout gui button in X session manager?

message GDB not able to start/exit - uncertain memory about details.
Comment:
Did the message appear in a console? In a terminal window? In a popup?
GDB? Sounds like a a desktop or session manager application, with a
watchdog function of sorts that tries to start a debugger when a session
process dies unexpectedly. GDB installed? Probably not. Unexpected
process death, could be effect of logout attempt, or "forced a quit" in
"blinkem" What is "forced quit"?
 
Comment:
This message appears to be harmless, but related to a kernel bug fixed in
later kernel releases. Probably unrelated to the other problems.
 
Comment:
Display :17.0 ???? Compputers usually have a "display.screen" of ":0.0".
Some are dual-head, with additional :0.1 or run independent "displays"
showing as :1.0 etc. When running ssh with X forwarding, the display is
typically set to "10.0". Where could this numbe 17 come from?
The window manager is a process separate from X. I don't know how
to trace how the display manager (the program that starts X) determines
what other programs to run for a user that has just logged in. The
windows manager would be one of them, directly or indirectly.


On Sun, 01 Jan 2006 20:49:15 +0100, Wayne Dernoncourt <com> wrote:
 

This seems to verify that the audit message (freeing multiple...)
is unrelated.

It is not clear to me how "gibberish" looks like, or how I could make
any inferences from this statement.
 

Which log file? /var/log/Xorg.0.log ?

This message looks significant. Is the xfs program running?
 

That is right, it's in /tmp as you note ...
 

Yes, this is it.
 

This seems to indicate that the xfs font server just started. Did it die?
The default config file is /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fs/config.
 

There is no file "fixed" on my system either. As Peter noted, it is
the last resort fallback, but that does not say where its data comes
from. I guess it will make the font server give you *any* font if it
has any at all, but preferring one that is marked monospaced or fixed-width
or something like that.

You have not told if you did "ps -ef | grep xfs", and what the outcome was.
If the server is running, does it not have any fonts? (I suppose you are
using a virtual console (Ctrl-Alt-F1 through F4, for example) to execute
commands when the X server fails to run.

The message "Fatal server error" sounds like it is the X server proper
that is deciding to quit since it does not have a font. No, that is not
likely. Could it be xfs that was outputing this message? Where did you
find it? If you found it in /var/log/messages, there is probably
"xfs[1234]:" or something similar in front of it.

The xfs config file, has among others this:

# where to look for fonts
#
catalogue = /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc:unscaled,
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi:unscaled,
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi:unscaled,
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc,
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1,
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/cyrillic,
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TTF,
/usr/share/fonts/default/Type1,
,
/usr/lib/openoffice/share/fonts/truetype,
/usr/share/fonts/japanese/misc:unscaled,
/usr/share/fonts/japanese/misc,
/usr/share/fonts/japanese/TrueType,
/usr/share/fonts/chinese/TrueType,
/usr/share/fonts/korean/misc:unscaled,
/usr/share/fonts/korean/misc,
/usr/share/fonts/korean/TrueType

on my system. How about yours? Do these directories exist? What do
they contain?

In a mail outside the newsgroup:

On Thu, 05 Jan 2006 12:01:00 +0100, Wayne Dernoncourt <com> wrote:
 

I see. :)
 

Yes.
 

Does not seem usefull to me (but no offense, it's OK to provide
things in the hope they be useful to others :) )
 

So you are using Gnome (the Fedora default) and it's probably running.
 

Yeah, but I am not sure if this file will disappear once the xfs server quits,
so I would prefer "ps -ef | grep xfs to know if it is running.
 

OK

I'm dying to hear about what causes the window manager problem (and the :17
message), and also what is going on with xfs. I suggest you try to esablish
as many facts as possible about everything concerning xfs first. If the process
is there and running, "lsof -p <xfs-process-id> shows it is using the file
/tmp/.font-unix/fs7100, the font files are there, as detailed in the config
file, then you could switch to the window manager issue.

My approach to debugging the window manager issue is to use "strace" (install
it from the CDs if you don't have it). You may have to change the file
/etc/X11/prefdm temporarily to put "strace -ff -o /tmp/gdm.strace "
in front of "$preferred "$@" >/dev/null 2>&1". Yes, also change
/dev/null to /tmp/gdm.out" in this line. Examining the strace files is
kind of hard. Write here to get help, I don't know yet if you will need
to do this, depending in the xfs issue.

-Enrique
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