X not starting after today's updates

[Joe Zeff]

The subject gives you the gist of the message.  To avoid retyping, I'm 
copying the body of my post to fedoraforums.org:

Today's updates included several Xorg components so I logged out, 
planning on logging back in. Instead, I got the splash screen, not the 
login screen. I tried going to other consoles and got the expected text 
login, except for Ctrl-Alt-F7 which got a blank screen. Logging in, 
either as myself or as root and trying startx failed, claiming that it 
couldn't find a screen. I tried (as root) telinit 3, which worked. Then, 
logged in as myself, I tried this:

su -c 'telinit 5'

It failed, with the same error. I'm reluctant to reboot unless and until 
I have to because that's rarely the right answer in the Linux world and 
because, right now, I doubt it would work. I'm posting from my laptop, 
and won't be updating it until I know my desktop's working OK.

BTW, my desktop has F 14 with Gnome, and an nVidia graphics cards for 
which I use kmod-nvidia. Any suggestions?

---------- Post added at 07:22 PM ---------- Previous post was at 06:57 
PM ----------

More info:

The error message is that the kmod is 260.19.29 but the driver is 260.19.36.

Checking with yum, I find that I have that newer version of the kmod 
(and akmod as well). However, last time I rebooted for a kernel update, 
the kmod wasn't there so my box used akmod to build it. Is there a way, 
other than a reboot, to get the right version of kmod running? I'll 
reboot if and only if needed, but I'd rather make sure it's the right 
thing first.