Red hat 9.0 +Ximian gnome: failure to log in
 

Hello all,

I'm not sure if this is a RTFM-question or anything that's been asked before here but I don't reallly know what to search for or which FM I should be checking. :/ The problem is this:

I've not been working with linux that long and I'm quite demanding. I wanted some extra software on my computer and guess what, I kept downloading, installing, uninstalling etc, because of dependencies. On a forum I read somewhere that Red Carpet should be quite useful for solving dependencies so I reinstalled Red Hat and downloaded and installed Ximian Gnome. Everything went fine, and I started happily updating and managing the system (until I found out that the software I wanted wasn't found or recognised by Red Carpet but that's a different matter)
Now what happened was that I couldn't log out of Ximian normally so the first number of times I just turned it off using that big shiny bottom at the front of the tower but after a while I remembered that there was a command line too. :o So I used the command "shutdown -h now". Computer shut down properly and I was happy again, until I restarted the system and at the graphical login I suddenly only had three types of sessions left: Gnome, "LAST" or another one I can't remember. At least it wasn't Ximian or KDE (which was also included in the system).
When I log in all that happens is that i get a purplish screen with my mouse point on it and nothing else. Nothing happens, except when I push ctrl+alt+backspace, then I get the same graphical login screen again.

Can somebody please tell me which log I need to find where to see what's going on or even better, tell me how to fix this? I already tried an "update" with the RH9 cd but that didn't help. Sorry about the long story by the way..

If you hit Ctrl-Alt-Backspace before you log in, it will kill the X session, and you'll be able to login to a text interface. Then you can look at the log files in /var/log to see what's going wrong when you login.

However, the chance of you being able to fix this is pretty small. It would probably be faster to reinstall from scratch, rather than screwing around with X for a few hours, and then reinstalling from scratch.

If you need to get files off of the drive before you reinstall, you could use tar to make them all into one file, and then burn them to cd, or email them to someone, or drop them at some website using lynx, or . . .

You might also try uninstalling X using the RH9 cds or rpm. Not pretty, but it might work.

thanks
 

I was hoping to do this in a less brutal way but what the heck.. Thnx