gdm murdered mysteriously starting RedHat 7.1 - X OK?
 

I have a fresh installation of Redhat 7.1. I got X (XFree86) working fine. I installed a few new fonts via gnorpm, and then ran sndconfig. It didn't want to be run in X so I ctrl-alt-bcksp'd out of X to configure my soundcard. This was successful. I then tried to restart X (startx). This bought up the redhat desktop but then flickered into a grey screen with a working mouse pointer but nothing else. My XF86Config file wasn't changed, according to the mod time. Now when I start linux at init level 5, or run startx as a user account, I get the desktop appearing then disappearing, and a grey screen. If I kill it (ctrl-alt-bcksp), I get 'gdm murdered suspiciously'. If I start X as root, I get a working desktop session. Can't find any problems with dmesg or in var/log/messages. Driving me mad - help please!

I'm having a similar problem
 

I'm having a similar problem. It looks like my "xfs" is broken somehow. During boot time it says "xfs" starts but it never really does. When I try xfs -droppriv it "cannot establish any listening sockets". When I just run xfs straight it starts fine, so for now I've changed the xfs script in init.d to not try -droppriv. I don't know how to fix the sockets problem yet, though. Anyone out there have any ideas?

Just had the same problem and solved it by changing the permissions of the tmp directory to chmod 0777

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...threadid=95399

Might not work in your case, but I got the same error message like you.