INIT: id "x" respawning too fast, disabled for 5 minutes

[Ben Steeves]

On Tue, 2004-03-09 at 17:06, Dennis King wrote:
> On reboot, the error message "INIT: id 'x' respawning too fast,
> disabled for 5 minutes" now comes up. The GNOME GUI doesn't launch,
> only the commannd line. I logged into the command line and ran rpm -i
> /var/spool/up2date/XF*rpm as root to see if some packages had not
> been installed, but there has been no changed. My hardward is an HP
> Pavillion that is probably 4 years old now (sorry I'm not at home now
> and can't provide the exact model number). I saw a similar bug in the
> Redhat knowledgebase regarding 7.3, but there was no solution
> offered, the user had had to reinstall 7.2, I think.
> 
> Any suggestions on getting my computer back? I'm afraid I'll have to
> copy content to floppies and install something new. 

Try (as root):

$ telinit 3 (probably best to do this at a console login)

-- to turn off gdm/X (it's already off from your description, but let's
be sort of safe)

$ rpm -qa | grep XF | perl -e 'while (<>) { 
             chomp; 
             /(XFree86-.*?)-[0-9]/; 
             push @r, $1; 
           } $list = join " ", at r; 
           print "rpm -e --nodeps $list\nup2date -i $list\n";'


-- this will generate a script that will (quite rudely) remove all the
XF* rpms from your system (line #1), then replace them (line #2).  Cut &
paste or redirect it to a file (called, maybe fix_xf.sh), then do:

% sh ./fix_xf.sh

-- to actually commit the crime.

I know this is a pretty heavy handed approach, but it'll save your
sanity.

-- 
Ben Steeves                     _                    bcs at metacon.ca
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