I'm running Red Hat 9 and this morning I went over to the windows side to do some stuff and then when I returned to linux, it booted up fine but then when it went to the login screen I got a bunch of junk that looked like a some sort of messed up dialogue. It had a "yes" and "no" at the bottom.

I reinstalled red hat without reformatting (which I think now was probably a little too hasty) but I'm still getting the same problem.

I figured out how to get to the command line login by typing Ctrl-Alt-F2, and I can log in fine, but when I try to start X (by typing "X") it tells me that it is already being used by 0 (I think) and recommends that I delete /tmp/.X0-lock (or something similar, I can't remember exactly).

It still doesn't work, however.

I tried to run mozilla, but this doesn't work. I think it says that GTK

Just before this happened I had installed aMule -- the P2P file sharing utility -- and this had required that I install wxGTK, wxBase and some other package that I can't remember. I had also installed a new GTK rpm because I was having some problems with installing wxGTK. Then I installed aMule and it appeared to work fine. I don't know if this stuff is what led to the failure...just though it might be good for y'all to know.

Thanks for any help.

-Dave Z.

look to /var/log/XFree86.log (or similar) and look there for any errors (maybe you want to do "cat /var/log/XFree86.log | grep WW" for easy of looking to errors).

Hope this helps.

Thanks for the help....

I actually have several XFree86 files: XFree86.0.log, XFree86.1.log, XFree86.2.log, XFree86.0.log-old XFree86.1.log-old. I tried what you suggested, but found no errors. The only WW's I got was in what appeared to be a section descriping what WW means.

Come to thing of it, though, there was also an EE defined there, but I didn't search for that. Maybe I should, huh?

-Dave Z.

You have to look at XFree86.0.log (because you're using display 0). WW is the Warning messages. But now that you mention it....I think i just screwed up my mind. You should be looking for EE (Errors) and not only Warnings (sorry dude >_<).When X fails to load, you have to look for those messages. If there's no EE, try to look at it closely and see if you can get some hint of what may cause the problem.

OK. I took another look and there were no EE's either. I looked through the file and didn't find anything that *really* stuck out at me, but the one thing that did make me wonder was that it looked like it was trying out bunch of different resolutions that weren't working. There was a lot of this:

(II) NV(0): Not using default mode "2048x1536" (bad mode clock/interlace/doublescan)
(II) NV(0): Not using default mode "1024x768" (hsync out of range)
(II) NV(0): Not using default mode "1400x1050" (width too large for virtual size)
(II) NV(0): Not using default mode "1280x1024" (width too large for virtual size)
(II) NV(0): Not using default mode "1280x960" (width too large for virtual size)
(II) NV(0): Not using default mode "1152x864" (width too large for virtual size)
(II) NV(0): Not using default mode "1152x768" (width too large for virtual size)

And a lot of this:

(--) NV(0): Virtual size is 800x600 (pitch 800)
(**) NV(0): *Default mode "800x600": 56.3 MHz, 53.7 kHz, 85.1 Hz
(II) NV(0): Modeline "800x600" 56.30 800 832 896 1048 600 601 604 631 +hsync +vsync
(**) NV(0): *Default mode "640x480": 36.0 MHz, 43.3 kHz, 85.0 Hz
(II) NV(0): Modeline "640x480" 36.00 640 696 752 832 480 481 484 509 -hsync -vsync
(**) NV(0): Default mode "800x600": 49.5 MHz, 46.9 kHz, 75.0 Hz
(II) NV(0): Modeline "800x600" 49.50 800 816 896 1056 600 601 604 625 +hsync +vsync
(**) NV(0): Default mode "800x600": 50.0 MHz, 48.1 kHz, 72.2 Hz

I'm not sure exactly what this is saying, but I thought that this maybe would tell you something. In any case, I put the whole file up at

http://djzanni.freeshell.org/XFree86.0.log

if you're interested in taking a look at it.

I'm actually downloading Fedora Core 2 in anticipation of not being able to figure this thing out.

Thanks.

-Dave Z.

mmmm I don't see anything wrong in the logfile... but i'm not a XFree86 guru as well, so this is beyond my linux skills. Sorry not to help

Thanks for trying. I'm probably just going to end up installing Fedora Core 2 anyway since it has some stuff in there (like ALSA in the Kernel and Wireless tools) that I've been having trouble with on RH 9.

-Dave Z.