Evening All,
I installed Ximian Gnome on the weekend using their installer. (Started out with RedHat 7.1) I used it for a few minutes then rebooted (old Windows habit).
Boot died at the end when X should start, video flickers a bit then text login reappears repeatedly. I figured out how to boot into runlevel 3 tonight (did I mention I'm a real newbie? guess I'm learning something now)
System logs look kinda weird to me - shouldn't
less /var/log/boot.log
show me today's bootup in run level 3? It doesn't - and it ends in midentry from yesterday. {half way through a line.}
/var/log/messages
similarly stops in the middle of an entry yesterday and today
Lots of weird stuff in the logs too - like
"gdm_slave_xioerror_handler: Fatal X error - Restarting :0"
"mtrr: no MTRR for de000000,400000 found"
"gdm_slave_session_start: Execution of PreSession script return >0, Aborting"
"gconfd: Could not write saved state file '/root/.gconfd/saved_state.tmp' fd: 11: No space left on device"
I know I'm in over my head here - anybody want to throw me a line? Suggestions other than reformat and redo welcome.... What info would help?

I'm not sure if this is your problem, but you may have run low on space on your hard drive. Run the command ' df ' and see how much disk space you have left.

Hmmm.... That looks promising. df shows 100% used.
Now to figure out what the heck is using all that space.
If I remember correctly the RH7.1 install was about 1.5 gig of an 8 gig drive, and the Ximian desktop was about 150 meg (I downloaded via dialup - so it wasn't multiple gig)
Guess I'll try uninstalling some software I wasn't going to use soon and see if I can dig up enough space to run Gnome again.
I wonder vaguely if my motherboard is having trouble recognizing the whole drive? df does seem to be reporting the size correctly... I'll post more when I know more - thanks for lead

OK - found a single file that was taking up almost 6 gig - .gnomerc-errors
Couldn't use 'less' on it (something to do with data type not matching) so I crossed my fingers and deleted it. Lo, and behold - everything now works (so far)! Anybody want to tell me what that file does and why it was 6 gig?