Suddenly I cannot log into my computer using gnome or kde. I will type in my user/pass, select the desktop, and push enter. It will display the fedora desktop background, go to black, and then go back to the login screen. I can however log into console mode, which leads me to believe its a problem with X Windows.

thanks in advance
-Lastomega

As well as you are able to remember, what did you do the last time you were logged in to GUI? Did you tweak some settings?

Since you are able to login to command-line, did you try startkde, startgnome, or init 5? what was the result? Can you reproduce the error messages?

Ok. I went to the console and tried 'startgnome' and it showed the unknown command error. 'init 5' did not give any message. 'startkde' said
I guess this would all fit together, as the last time I was on gnome I was trying to install openoffice. So--the memory is full. But is it on the hard drive or ram? how do I clear up some space?

From the console, su to root, then cd to /tmp. ls -l to see what's in there (including tmp file sizes, date stamps, etc). Delete everything that doesn't have todays date.

Once you have freed up some hard disk space, you should be able to start the GUI again.

Then it would ge a good idea to go to /var/log and start clearing out some logs. Any archived logs that you don't want (file extension .gz) could be deleted. Any file with extension .old can be deleted. Any other logs should be examined to see if there is any information you need (copy the part you need and save it somewhere), then clear out the logs: /dev/null > messages (or whatever the log name is) to reduce the file size to zero. After that, make it a habit to clear out the logs once a week, and check /tmp regularly to get rid of anything you don't want. There is an option somewhere that can be set to clear /tmp on shutdown.