Comment 2 for bug 313959

Okay, all looks good now. The dist-upgrade appears to have
worked, mail is being sent and received, and my manual
fixes to grub's menu.lst seemed to work well until it got to the point of starting the Gnome Display Manager. An alert
panel (text mode) popped saying:

Server Authorization directory (daemon/ServAuthDir) is set to
/var/lib/gdm but is not owned by user 108 and group 113. Please
correct the ownership or GDM configuration and restart GDM.

                             OK

Now, /var/lib/gdm is listed as user and group gdm, and ls -ldn
of /var/lib/gdm shows it is owned by user 108 and group 113.
gdm is in /etc/passwd (uid 108) and /etc/groups (gid 113).
Directory permissions are:
drwxr-x--- 3 108 113 4096 2009-01-05 16:39 /var/lib/gdm
drwxr-x--- 3 gdm gdm 4096 2009-01-05 16:39 /var/lib/gdm

Unfortunately, there appears no way to make the highlighted
OK apply - Enter does nothing, and I can't even Ctrl-Alt-Bksp
since X isn't running.

A ps revealed something called whiptail running with that error
message, so I killed that. Things proceeded, with an error saying
that gdm would not be started, and I was at a text console.

But / had been mounted read-only. I rebooted again, and this time
there was a message about md1 (i.e. /) not runninmg, and did I want to try to start it. It timed out while I was reading that and
dropped me to busybox.

I rebooted a 3rd time and this time it proceeded past that point but said the root filesystem was dirty, and fscked it. But that failed with an error that it required a manual fsck. I did that,
and it fixed maybe 12~20 errors, and I rebooted. Actually it
then presented me with the Resume/Fix packages/FS check/...
text choices panel thing, so I tried to TAB to choose Resume
and after a while text appeared in the middle asking if I wanted
to list all N-thousand possibilities so obviously the screen hadn't
been cleared and I was back at a dirty text console running bash.

So I again did the Ctrl-Alt-Del and the reboot proceeded.

This time all was well. Even the nvidia driver is in place and working, with my hand-crafted twinview xorg.conf, whereas
previously each new kernel install required stopping X (GDM),
running the nvidia script, and restarting GDM. Brilliant!

luke