I recently upgraded a machine (my main workstation) from FC 23 to FC 24, and there's a problem

The install was from the Workstation version and the checksum correctgly matches (actually I always make 2 copies, just in case, which I hold on to forever - they both check).

I did the install, and intitially (until I added other users) everything was fine - no problems in logging in.
However, I have an imortant app which I support and it needs the entire root screen and can't coexist with plasma shell, so the machine normally runs in multi-user mode, and X sessions are accessed via /usr/bin/startx.  (This has been working since the days of Redhat 5 through FC1 and up to and including FC23 - I never tried FC 24 - and has never given a bit of trouble.)

After I added a non-privileged user for myself the fun began.  The biggest issue was that a non-privileged user could nto run an X-server (not via startx anyway). FWIW I can't run the Wayland server since I am using an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 950 and wayland doensn't handle it yet.  The problem occurs whether I use the O/S nouveau drivers or install the proprieary (xO/S ?) Nvidia drivers.

Hardware details : CPU is Intel i7 with 6 cores (show up as 12 in Linux), MSI X99A Xpower motherboard with 32 GB memory (4 8gb sticks), 7 drives totalling ~24 TB of local disk space.

ERROR MESSAGE:
There have been 2 (each is the one-line err msg from a failed session attempt) - the current one is the latter, and both look as if they have been munged slightly:

waiting for X server to shut down (II) Server terminated successfully (0). Closing log file.c-common: line 46: XKB_IN_USE: unbound variablexinit: connection to X server lost

waiting for X server to shut down (II) Server terminated successfully (0). Closing log file.initrc-common: line 46: XKB_IN_USE: unbound variablexinit: connection to X server lost

LOG: /var/log - I can furnish a copy, but I didn't see any obvious "gotcha's" in it.

Now I am a former kernel hacker, was a contributor to XFree86, have been a Linus (and Solaris and HP-UX) SA for over 20 years, and I have been building my workstations and servers from off-the-shelf components since before the PC was invented, so I am not a newbie and generally I can solve most problems, and FWIW I don't think I've done anyting really stupid here. Finally, fWIW this particular machine ran FC 23 with not problems whatsoever.  Just to make sure that something had no happened hardware wise, I switched the boot loader to look back at the FC23 partition, and it still boots and runs correctly without the Xorg problem.

I have gone to bugzilla and posted the bug, but so far it does not appear to have been looked at, so no help there.

This has been going on now for about 2 weeks.  I tried to solve the problem for 3 days then blew the installation away and redid it, this time installing the server version.
Of course I had to add the X/desktop pieces and it took almost a day to get everyting that I needed installed. The same thing happened, and I am now on install # from the Workstaion spin.  And yes, the same problem still happens every time.

I'm beginning to suspect that something in my own environment causes the problem, so I added a new, completely vanilla user ("dummy") and he seems to get the same results.

Any help and/or suggestions would be appreciated, and please feel free to contact me off list if that is easier for you.  

Thanks,

william w. austin                                 wwaustin@google.com
"life is just another phase i'm going through. this time, anyway ..."