INIT: id "X" respawning too fast in FC8
 

Hi group,

I have this annoying bug that is getting real old.

From time to time I get this message after booting and trying to come
up to Init 5:

INIT: id "X" respawning too fast

I can still do a "startx" to get to the desktop.

I have done a Google search and found nothing that seamed to fit my
configuration. I found that by doing a force reinstall of GDM, it will fix
the problem. I use this:

rpm --force -i gdm-2.20.3-1.fc8.i386.rpm

Does anyone know how to fix this for real??

It would help if you posted the contents of /etc/inittab .

It sounds like some program being launched by init is failing (quickly), triggering a respawn.

OK, here is inttab
 

Just a standard inittab, nothing special.

$ cat /etc/inittab
#
# inittab This file describes how the INIT process should set up
# the system in a certain run-level.
#
# Author: Miquel van Smoorenburg, <miquels@drinkel.nl.mugnet.org>
# Modified for RHS Linux by Marc Ewing and Donnie Barnes
#

# Default runlevel. The runlevels used by RHS are:
# 0 - halt (Do NOT set initdefault to this)
# 1 - Single user mode
# 2 - Multiuser, without NFS (The same as 3, if you do not have networking)
# 3 - Full multiuser mode
# 4 - unused
# 5 - X11
# 6 - reboot (Do NOT set initdefault to this)
#
id:5:initdefault:

# System initialization.
si::sysinit:/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit

l0:0:wait:/etc/rc.d/rc 0
l1:1:wait:/etc/rc.d/rc 1
l2:2:wait:/etc/rc.d/rc 2
l3:3:wait:/etc/rc.d/rc 3
l4:4:wait:/etc/rc.d/rc 4
l5:5:wait:/etc/rc.d/rc 5
l6:6:wait:/etc/rc.d/rc 6

# Trap CTRL-ALT-DELETE
ca::ctrlaltdel:/sbin/shutdown -t3 -r now

# When our UPS tells us power has failed, assume we have a few minutes
# of power left. Schedule a shutdown for 2 minutes from now.
# This does, of course, assume you have powerd installed and your
# UPS connected and working correctly.
pf::powerfail:/sbin/shutdown -f -h +2 "Power Failure; System Shutting Down"

# If power was restored before the shutdown kicked in, cancel it.
pr:12345:powerokwait:/sbin/shutdown -c "Power Restored; Shutdown Cancelled"


# Run gettys in standard runlevels
1:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty1
2:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty2
3:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty3
4:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty4
5:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty5
6:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty6

# Run xdm in runlevel 5
x:5:respawn:/etc/X11/prefdm -nodaemon

Ah - so when you said 'INIT: id "X" respawning too fast', you meant literally "X"? (I had assumed you put X because a variety of ids showed up there...)

In that case, it looks like the command "/etc/X11/prefdm -nodaemon" is exiting right away, instead of running continuously like it should.

Check out this thread:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...-error-410229/

The suggestion there is to start without X, then run the script manually, seeing if there's any output.

This runs the script with shell verbosity on:
sh -x -v /etc/X11/prefdm -nodaemon

See if the output or /var/log/Xorg.0.log has anything interesting.

Edit: Also, prefdm apparently could be a symlink to gdm, or a shell script. You might want to figure which is the case, that it's running the right thing, and that there aren't any bootscripts messing with it.