Progress on getting my desktop working properly

[Marko Vojinovic]

On Sunday 18 December 2011 20:00:25 Joe Zeff wrote:
> I've cleaned up all of the problems reported by package-cleanup.
> Checking for dupes reported over 1400 duplicate packages; but telling it
> to clean them hung the program.  I've spent the last several days
> hacking away at this, little by little until I got down to about 1025 or
> so, and tried again.  This time, it worked, although there were some
> non-fatal errors in the post uninstall scripts.  Checking again, there
> are no more dupes, no more problems.  I'm about to try a system update
> via yumex and see what happens.

Looking back at the amount of time and work you spent on it, wouldn't it have 
been easier to just backup&wipe&cleaninstall F16 instead? :-)

But OTOH hey, congratulations for persistance and beating the machine into 
submission... ;-)

> I suspect that I'm going to have to reboot, and will try rebooting to a
> full graphic environment, using kdm instead of gdm.  If this fails and I
> have to reboot to runlevel 3, what logs can I use to find out what isn't
> working?

The main X log is in /var/log/Xorg.0.log (but IIRC that one was showing X to 
start normally).

The KDM log is in /var/log/kdm.log, and the GDM log should be somewhere inside 
/var/log/gdm/ (I don't use GDM so I don't have any logfile to check).

Also, other informative logs are the /home/yourusername/.xsession-errors* 
files. They are usually full of errors even in a successful X session... ;-)

Finally, there is /var/log/messages to search through, if all else fails.

IIRC, once in runlevel 3, you can successfully startx, right? If yes, then 
AFAIK the only place where a problem can be in runlevel 5 is the gdm greeter. 
;-)

HTH, :-)
Marko