Unable to get into X

[Marko Vojinovic]

On Friday 09 December 2011 01:37:06 Marko Vojinovic wrote:
> In order to debug the above faulty-GDM scenario, try the following:
> 
> * boot into runlevel 3 and login (not as root)
> * startx
> // this should start X and then GDM, which should fail only once and put you
> back into the terminal, hopefully with an error message from GDM or
> whatever other thing that has failed //

Oops, sorry, this will not start GDM, but will start Gnome3 (or whatever DE 
you have configured) directly. This is because you are already logged in and 
the greeter is not necessary.

So proceed like this:

* if your DE starts correctly, the culprit is most probably GDM, since there 
is nothing else in between --- switch to KDM as per instructions below and 
retry the runlevel 5
* if your DE fails to start, there should be an error message about what 
happened. In that case proceed as before:

> * post the output of that error message, if any
> * give us a link to the snapshot of /var/log/messages
> * give us a link to the output of dmesg
> * keep booting in runlevel 3 until the system is fixed --- at least the
> machine will be running in a sane state.
> 
> If you find out that GDM is the culprit, you may:
> 
> * boot into runlevel 3
> * yum install kdm
> * edit /etc/sysconfig/desktop so that it contains:
> 
> DISPLAYMANAGER="KDE"
> 
> // If the file /ets/sysconfig/desktop doesn't exist, create it //
> * startx
> * report if that works.
> 
> Additionally, once you are in runlevel 3, it might be a good idea to do a
> "yum update", just to cover all bases.
> 
> Report back on what happens. ;-)

HTH, :-)
Marko