I have a fresh install of FC5 on a Dell Precision 330. The GUI install went without a hitch, and the system was rebooted after install. Once there, X starts up apparently successfully, and the mouse cursor in the shape of an "X" sits on a black background. The system is stuck here, but not locked. I can ctrl+alt+Fn and switch to different consoles, but not to a login console.

It looks like firstboot is stuck?

I edited the boot line to boot to runlevel 3, instead of 5. Logged in as root and typed "startx". The GUI begins to come up and then it fails with the following error:

/usr/bin/gnome-session: error while loading shared libraries: libXrender.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Does anybody have any suggestions? I've tried reinstalling and it is reproducable. Before I reinstalled this time, I did a yum update and got all the latest patches, but that didn't work either.

Check if you have this shared object file and link in /usr/lib

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 19 Mar 26 16:35 libXrender.so.1 -> libXrender.so.1.3.0
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 33184 Feb 12 02:57 libXrender.so.1.3.0

If not, install them from this rpm file on the first FC5 distribution disk:

libXrender-0.9.0.2-3.2.i386.rpm

It may even be easier to yum install libXrender at the command line.

Ok, did a "yum install libXrender"

Now, startx begins to show the desktop, with the bars on top and bottom, but no icons or menus appear. There is a dialog box that pops, but no text or buttons within it. Then X tries all over again. When I ctrl+alt+bkspc to kill X, there's a lot of messages to the screen. Some of them say that Gtk couldn't load image or recognize image file format for some of the Bluecurve png files. Also, there are numerous messages relating to Pango. The most interesting pango message states "No builtin or dynamically loaded modules were found". It says I should run pango-querymodules.

pango-querymodules does not exist, but there is a pango-querymodules-32. That makes no difference.

Tried running system-config-display. Get the same messages as above with startx.

Also, for the record: the DVD I am using has been used successfully on two different systems prior to this one, so I know that the media is good.

I think I have it resolved, though it was a pain in the arse. I found the install.log file on root's home directory and looked at it. It seems that libXrender failing caused many other apps to fail because of dependency to libXrender. There were 31 in all that I could see that failed. I did the following to correct it:

First I removed the app, telling RPM to ignore dependencies:
Then I told yum to install it again:
It was tedious, but I think I got them all. Now X starts successfully, and I'm off and running.