Hi!

I want to apologize first off if this has been covered before, and I'm sure it has, because this is too stupid a problem to have as of yet have lurked in the shadows of ignorance-ity (sp?). I tried searching, but the keywords my feeble brain comes up with are obviously not up to the standard that the forum robot demands - so I came here instead.

I just had a power failure - I'm fine, in case you were worrying - and when I tried to boot up my FC2 box, (which has been running fine, it's all I need), it gets past all the checks and normal bootup, and then attempts to drop to the GUI login screen that you normally see.

However, my box seems to have forgotten what normal is, since the screen flickers like normal seemingly about to show me the light-blue screen where I get to happily answer some skill-testing questions about my name and password, but never gets that far. In shock, I watch in horror as the screen flickers again, and shows me the non-GUI console login prompt for about 1 second before trying again to load the GUI login screen. And it then does it again. And again. ...And yes, again. Annnnd again. You get the idea.

To give you an idea how desperate I am, I've attempted to type my login/pass at the console during the 1 second out of 10 that I see it during this monitor cycling. It actually worked, but I rapidly became enraged of having to wait 10-15 seconds each time to correct typos in my commands only to have the screen whisked away from me yet again as my computer laughed at my pathetic attempt at using it.

I've rebooted like 10 times, I don't think this helped. What my box needs is a good smack, but that solution never seems to work out well for me (or my wallet...).

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance!

Try CTRL + ALT + F1. Its a commandline with no X what so ever. You may be able to switch over to that tty and edit your inittab to boot into level 3 instead of 5. From here, you may be able to either startx and diagnose the problem, or (as I would try first - it really can't hurt) to reconfigure the X server's config file. You neglected to mention if you are using Xorg or XFree86, but the commands are "xorgconfig" and "xf86config" - they the same thing.

Good luck!

OK, an update, for all those who shall follow...

The CTRL-ATL-F1 tip actually worked wonders. For reasons I cannot fathom, hitting that key combo once did nothing to interrupt the evil cycle of X attempting to start. However, getting angry and hitting CTRL-ALT-F1 repeatedly, and most importantly, with a lot of force caused the cycling to stop, and an box appeared telling me that try as it might, it couldn't get X to start. Knowledge is power.

Anyways, after asking for more info and stuff, I read through a error log where it stated (among other things) that:
"Could not init font path element unix/:7100, removing from list!

Fatal server error:
Could not open default font 'fixed'

Please consult http://wiki.X.Org for help
Please also check the log file "/var/log/Xorg.0.log for additional info"

So, armed with an error message, I attacked the internet.

I found that for some reason, my FontPath variable in the XOrg config file had changed to that unix:7100 thing, and I had to change it back to its default:
FontPath "/usr/11R6/lib/X11/fonts"
instead of
FontPath "unix/:7100"

Since I was still in the tty, I simply used vi to do this:
$vi /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Magically, $startx now worked! I didn't actually have to mess with the runlevels (init 3), but that would have been a necessary next step if keyboard shortcut didn't work.

Afterwards, when I tried logging in with my normal user accounts, I found out that my entire / partition was full, and there was no room left to write the the authorization file - I got the message "GDM could not write to your authorization file. This could mean that you are out of disk space or that your home directory could not be opened for writing. In any case, it is not possible to log in. Please contact your system administrator."

Fortunately I was able to download a copy of xdiskusage to tell me what was eating up all the space, and I was able to delete unecessary things and solve the GDM problem.

Abadee-Abadee That's All, Folks! Thanks for the tip, xpromisex.

Good to hear that it worked.


Even if it did work in a way I didn't imagine it would.

Hey there,

I had the same issue after a power outage, and thanks to this thread I was able to get X11 started again... after that I also ran into the having no disk space issue, and I was able to delete a few large files that I knew I was done with... but I'm having trouble pinpointing what else is eating away at my hard drive. Could you maybe point out a few of things you deleted? I figure it's things like overgrown error logs, but I'm new enough at linux/unix that I wouldn't know what logs to go looking for...

Hi goolsnok,

I recommend trying the xdiskusage program that I linked to in my previous post. It's nothing spectacular, but it does show you which folders are eating up the most room, and you can use that to decide what you want to delete. In my case I noticed that OpenOffice.org was eating a large amount of space, and since I never use it on that computer, I mercilessly removed all traces of it. After that, I had enough room (apparently) to log into my normal user accounts.

Hope this helps!