X won't start on F14 - I've run out of ideas!

[Claude Jones]

James McKenzie has suggested I post this here: there's a longer thread 
on this same issue, with the same subject line on the Fedora list, if 
anyone cares to read it

He said:

 > Can you report this on the test mailing list as well to make

 > them aware  of this 'fix' and that the problem persisted

 > through a reboot when you upgraded from an older FC

 > version.  May stop this from happening when FC 14 becomes

 > available to the general public.


And I replied:

I'm not really sure how to formulate such a report. I had a problem with 
X starting properly after some updates of a month or so ago. I have no 
recollection which round of updates started the problem. I tried many, 
many, things to resolve this, but to no avail. Whatever the problem was 
(which I never was able to discover), a simple upgrade of my F13 system 
to F14TC1 didn't resolve the issue; the upgrade replaced and updated 
many packages, too numerous to count - I posted all this, but only got a 
few replies, so I was apparently on unencountered territory; the final 
fix was to reinstall F14x64TC1, but rather than upgrading, I fresh 
installed; I used the custom drive layout option and deleted everything 
on my / and /boot partitions, reformatting them, while leaving /home intact


If someone thinks there's a reportable bug to be found in this, I'd be 
glad to report it - seems like an insufficient information problem to me.
A couple of additional details - I and several others looked at the 
messages, boot.log, Xorg.0.log, and dmesg logs and couldn't spot an issue.
On the old F13 install where the problem began, I was then running the 
nVidia proprietary driver from rpmfusion; the first thing I did was 
uninstall the nvidia driver and delete the nouveau blacklist entries in 
grub.conf; lsmod then showed the nvidia driver gone and the nouveau 
driver active, yet, the problem persisted. Booting to runlevel 3 and 
starting X from normal user, a new test user, and from root user, all 
produced the same results - a momentary blanking of the screen, followed 
by a return to the command prompt, and no useful info either in the 
instant messages produced at the prompt, or in the logs...


-- 
Claude Jones Brunswick, MD, USA