X doesn't start

[Stuart Sears]

On Sunday 01 May 2005 22:11, Deboo Geek wrote:
> I had a normal working X a few days back. I have a dual bot system and
> needed an app for a few days to work on som eproject so did not boot
> in to linux for some days. Now when I boot in to linux, neither do I
> get the gdm screen for login nor can I start X from console. I got the
> error : "Failed to load default font fixed.
This quite often means that the X font server is not running.
make sure that you are in runlevel 3, not 5:
init 3
service xfs status
if it isn't running, then 
service xfs start
and test again with
startx

One other thing that I have found to cause the same error message is faulty 
permissions on /tmp. ls -ld /tmp should look like this:

drwxrwxrwt  14 root root 12288 May  2 10:46 /tmp/

if it doesn't, then chmod 1777 /tmp will fix that
>
> This PC has an Intel 865GF MB which is not detected by the kernel
> 2.4.x which I'm on but still X was doing okay. I tried booting off of
> knoppix and copying knoppix's XF86Config but now I get the error : No
> screens found. How is knoppix able to start X and when I copy i t's
> XF86Config, that doesn't work?
differing paths in the file, possibly?
which display drivers (grep driver /etc/X11/XF86Config) was the knoppix 
version using?
> I kept looking for some tool to configure X, but there's no console
> tool I could find. There used to be xf86config in old RH systems but
> even that is not in Fedora, stramge! I have searched the Fedora
> install CDs but there's no such tool
actually many of the system-config-* tools work fine on a console.
You stated that you had kernel 2.4. This would suggest you are running Fedora 
Core 1. In which case (I think) the commands were
redhat-config-*
so to configure your display you use
redhat-config-xfree86 --reconfig --noui
(leave off the --noui if you want it to start the graphical config tool)


> This raises another question:  Is there a rpm equivalent to Debian's
> apt-cache search and apt-cache show commands?
apt works fine on Fedora Core - you can download it from 
http://dag.wieers.com/packages/apt/
the other alternative is yum, also available from dag. Although on latyer  
releases of Fedora Core it is part of the distribution


--
Stuart Sears RHCE RHCX RTFM
Don't worry.  Life's too long.
		-- Vincent Sardi, Jr.