OK, this is a new one for me. . .

I rebooted my system and it started up ok, but when I got to the /etc/issue message, where it usually fires up x for the GUI login I got this message:

INIT Id "x" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes

after 5 minutes it says the same thing again. I can switch consoles and use the system as normal from a text prompt, but x won't fire up.

I have not configured anything for x or INIT or anything since the last time it worked normally. The only thing I did was change one of the labels in grub.conf from "DOS" to "Windows 95" (my roommates don't know DOS from donuts!), but I don't see how this could possibly affect X.

I'm using RedHat 8.0, on a i586

Anybody know what's up?
TIA

Is there anthing ominous in the logs?

Not sure, I had to post this from windows, as Lynx doesn't appear to be working either!?! I'll go check. . .

OK. ..
boot.log is fine
dmesg is fine
messages has the same thing as above
XFree86.log is fine, but I assume this is because it only logged the last time X was successfully started

any other logs I should check?

No, the XFree86.log file should update everytime X attempts to start. Do a "cat /dev/null > XFree86.log" and then try to "startx" just to be sure.

I know you're all following this post with bated breath to see if I can figure it out, well I did:

I followed jdc2048's advice, but got nothing from /dev/null. startx crapped out with a more useful error message: I upgraded my openssl package, without realizing that X was dependent on some of the shared-object libraries. So, uninstall the new one, reinstall the old one and I'm good to go.

So now my question is this: What does ssl have to do with X, other than secure http in a browser? Am I missing the point of what ssl does?

Thanks for the help.

I had installed a series of updates recently on RH7.3 using the Red Carpet updater (Ximian's version of the RHN). Afterwards my X wouldn't work any more. It turns out that one of the updates (glibc I think) was overwriting my "/etc/ld.so.conf" file which was causing problems with a library that was stashed away in an odd place.

Did your openssl update include dependencies? Could you list the RPM's you were installing (including version).

----------------------------------
Jeremiah

Redhat 8 comes with openssl-0.9.6b-29
I was trying to install openssl-0.9.6g

I don't know why I did, it was a foolish attempt to have https support for konqueror, which does not appear to have it "out of the box". I made the new version from source, because I could not find an RPM for it, so it did not warn for dependencies.