I installed Fedora 6 as a guest machine on a Vmware ESX server. When I tried to start X session the session came up to the login interface. When I logged in as root an error message immediately came up

"localuser: root being added to access control list /usr/bin/gnome_session: error while loading shared libraries: libasound.so.2: Cannot open shared object file: no such file or directory".

Anyone experienced enough with Fedora to tell me how to troubleshoot this error, or anyone had it happen to them?

First update FC6 using yum: yum update
Second make sure you have the xorg-x11-drv-vmware-10.13.0-2.1 rpm package installed and is set as the xorg driver;

system-config-display --reconfig --set-driver=vmware

Do all of this from runlevel 3

Thanks for the help with the virtual machine. I have another question as well. I built another Fedora Core 6 box this morning and the install went well. After install I started YUM updates and it has been installing updates ever since. Not only is it installing but it has only installed 18 out of 402 because it keeps timing out and searching for new mirrors while trying to download updates. Is this usually expected behavior or should I kill the updates and start over?

Yes it is quite common for updating to take a long time, especially when you have 402 updates. And yes sometimes the mirrors get a bit overwhelmed, some have found it is better to wait until after 6:00PM EST for updating.

Thanks for the help I will let it run all night and see where we are tomorrow AM.

Aparrently my networking isn't working in the virtual machine because when I went to do yum update it gave an error that a nameserver wasn't specified. Can anyone give me the steps of setting up Fedora Core 6 network using command line? I think I have the IP address set okay but not sure about the DNS server entries or where to put them? The network segment this machine is on has no dhcp so it all has to be static.

I would suggest checking the physical connection to the network, the cable and where they plug into. You stated already;

This means the virtual network is working, or was at least at that time. The virtual FC6 system should by default been configured to use dhcp at boot. Maybe the 'timing out' is because of physical connection issue.

Please check;

/sbin/ifconfig eth0
traceroute xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx <--to a known internal network TCP/IP address

The shared libraries: libasound.so.2 is part of the alsa-libs package, is alsa installed on the virtual system???

rpm -qa 'alsa*'

If not then it can be installed from the FC6 installation media.