Could not update ICEauthority file /var/lib/gdm/.ICEauthority

[Ulf Samuelsson <openembedded@emagii.com>]

I built a derivative of cloud9-gnome-image/Angstrom-1.4  for the 
Beaglebone Black on an Ubuntu 12.04 host.

When I boot, I get a popup window with the text:

"Could not update ICEauthority file /var/lib/gdm/.ICEauthority"

This appears because /var/lib/gdm is not owned by gdm.
Instead it is owned by 115:125

I manually changed the owner and rebooted, and this time I did not get 
the error message.

I tracked down why:

The recipe for gdm in 
meta-openembedded/meta-gnome/recipes-gnome/gdm_2.32.2.bb contains:


------------------------------------------------------------------------------
do_install_append() {
     ...
     chown -R gdm:gdm ${D}${localstatedir}/lib/gdm
     chmod 0750 ${D}${localstatedir}/lib/gdm
     ...
}
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Problem with this approach is that the chown command is using the 
user:group of the host .

If I do
<host> # cat /etc/passwd | grep gdm
I get:

gdm:x:115:125:Gnome Display Manager:/var/lib/gdm:/bin/false

If I do the same on the target I get:

root@beaglebone:~# cat /etc/passwd | grep gdm
I get:
gdm:x:997:993::/var/lib/gdm:/bin/sh

so I think that setting the user:group must be done in a postinstall task.


-- 
Best Regards
Ulf Samuelsson