[Nottingham] Fedora Core 2.0 - GDM problem, please help

[Neil Stevenson]

Hi everyone,

Can someone help with this problem I have?

I upgraded my Fedora Core 1 machine to Fedora Core 2, all went smoothly,
the RedHat installer worked fine, I selected the 'upgrade' option, all
the files went on without a hitch and the machine rebooted correctly.
The startup went smoothly (into runlevel 5), until it tried to run GDM -
the Gnome graphical login screen.

The error being reported says that 'you already have an X server running
on terminal :0' - it gives me the option to retry that screen or try the
next number along.  Trying another reports the same problem, while
retrying :0 again (even if I kill the X server in the meantime) can
cause the machine to lock up completely.  To work around the issue, I
changed to runlevel 3. and the machine boots and is useable.  'startx'
works fine, the GUI from both KDE and GNOME is working perfectly.  Here
are some of my observations:

- I had this problem since installation.  My video card is a GeForce
FX5600; I upgraded the video driver to the official NVidia one; that
speeds up the graphics enormously, but doesn't fix the problem.
- Running gdm from the command line in runlevel 3 causes the same
problem, but I don't get the problem if I start kdm, the KDE equivalent.
- This suggests that setting '/etc/sysconfig/desktop' to 'KDE' would fix
the problem, but it doesn't, the system still behaves in the same way,
whether I reboot in rulevel 5 or change to that from a safe boot.
- Checking through the Xorg.0.log file doesn't reveal anything, the last
message was just a report that X display :0 is already in use.
- The machine runs a VNC server by default, but the problem happens
whether this is enabled or disabled.

Does anyone know what is going on?  If you need any extra information,
then please ask.  I'm truly stumped with this, and there's nothing I've
been unable to make work on my Linux PC's before.

Cheers.

Neil.

----------------
 Neil Stevenson
 www.citel.com
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