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I have an old Proliant DL380 G4, dual 3.6 GHz Xeons, 6GB RAM. I installed CentOS 6.2 and added X during the install. When I startx, I get kind of a blue screen with three little icons. No menus or anything. No way to exit. Ctrl-Alt-Backspace doesn't work. Sometimes I can Ctrl-Alt-Fx to another console and kill all X processes to end it, but sometimes that strange desktop just freezes solid and I have to pull the power.
1) How can I find out what WM it's actually using?
2) How can I specify which WM to use?
3) How can I get it to exit without a hard reboot so I can look in the logs to see why it's acting weird?
4) Is there an X configuration utility I can run from the command line? There used to be one years and years ago, and it was very useful to find a working X config!
You should be able to inspect /etc/X11/xinit/Xclients. It sources /etc/sysconfig/desktop to find out what desktop to use, but uses a couple of different fallbacks if the preferred/specified one doesn't work out.
Use "yum grouplist" and see if you've got Desktop, Desktop platform, and General putpose desktop installed.
I was missing one of the three, so I installed it. Now I get menus, but no mouse pointer, and no key combination seems to do anything.
Code:
[me@localhost ~]$ yum grouplist
Loaded plugins: fastestmirror, refresh-packagekit, security
Setting up Group Process
Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile
* base: mirror.anl.gov
* extras: centos.mirror.nac.net
* updates: centos.aol.com
Installed Groups:
Additional Development
Base
Client management tools
Console internet tools
Debugging Tools
Desktop
Desktop Platform
Dial-up Networking Support
E-mail server
Fonts
General Purpose Desktop
Graphical Administration Tools
Hardware monitoring utilities
Java Platform
Large Systems Performance
Legacy UNIX compatibility
Legacy X Window System compatibility
Messaging Client Support
NFS file server
Network Infrastructure Server
Network file system client
Networking Tools
Performance Tools
Perl Support
Scientific support
Server Platform
Systems Management Messaging Server support
Virtualization
Virtualization Client
Virtualization Platform
Web Server
X Window System
iSCSI Storage Client
So, I reinstalled and all is well now. Previously, I'd used the Virtualization role and added X. This time, I chose the Desktop role and added Virtualization. C'est la vie...
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