respawning too fast....
 

I installed Redhat 7.3 and am getting the Id "x" respawning error that I've seen soooooo often mentioned on a million boards everywhere. But I can't seem to fix it! The weird thing is that the first time I had installed RH 7.3 it was fine. I've installed it again on a new hard drive and it's driving me nuts!

I have a Geforce2 MX and Samsung SyncMaster 950p monitor. I went to the command line using "linux rescue" and ran Xconfigurator to fix things (a friend told me that perhaps I had selected the wrong monitor and should reconfigure my display). I rebooted but the problem hasn't gone away. I went through rescue again and this time ran xdm and got into KDE since that's what I installed and selected as my interface during installation. Once in, I wasn't able to use my mouse and I got a sound error, but everything else was ok.

I realize I'm going about this in a haphazard fashion but I really am lost... what do I do? What did I do right last time that I am not doing now? Anyone have any thoughts? Anyone been through this?

reddybear

I'm not 100% sure, but I think this error occurs if your /etc/inittab has a line that tries to do something that simply doesn't make sense. For example, there may be a line that points to a broken program or something.

I'm just guessing here, but one reason could be that you're trying to boot straightly to X. When you boot straightly to X, the system tries to execute a graphical login manager, and the system is supposed to respawn - this means, re-start the graphical login after it's been exited.

Now if there's something wrong with your graphical login manager (kdm, gdm, xdm, whatever is your default), the system may not be able to execute it, and because it's configured to restart efter exit, it's just trying to execute it again and agin. If that's the case, you may need to change your login manager or boot to command line instead of X.

I don't know how to solve your problem, but could you post here the contents of your /etc/inittab file so the people here could take a look at it?

here's the inittab
 

Here's my /etc/inittab. Thanks for all the help.

#
# inittab This file describes how the INIT process should set up
# the system in a certain run-level.
#
# Author: Miquel van Smoorenburg, <miquels@drinkel.nl.mugnet.org>
# Modified for RHS Linux by Marc Ewing and Donnie Barnes
#

# Default runlevel. The runlevels used by RHS are:
# 0 - halt (Do NOT set initdefault to this)
# 1 - Single user mode
# 2 - Multiuser, without NFS (The same as 3, if you do not have networking)
# 3 - Full multiuser mode
# 4 - unused
# 5 - X11
# 6 - reboot (Do NOT set initdefault to this)
#
id:5:initdefault:

# System initialization.
si::sysinit:/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit

l0:0:wait:/etc/rc.d/rc 0
l1:1:wait:/etc/rc.d/rc 1
l2:2:wait:/etc/rc.d/rc 2
l3:3:wait:/etc/rc.d/rc 3
l4:4:wait:/etc/rc.d/rc 4
l5:5:wait:/etc/rc.d/rc 5
l6:6:wait:/etc/rc.d/rc 6

# Things to run in every runlevel.
ud::once:/sbin/update

# Trap CTRL-ALT-DELETE
ca::ctrlaltdel:/sbin/shutdown -t3 -r now

# When our UPS tells us power has failed, assume we have a few minutes
# of power left. Schedule a shutdown for 2 minutes from now.
# This does, of course, assume you have powerd installed and your
# UPS connected and working correctly.
pf::powerfail:/sbin/shutdown -f -h +2 "Power Failure; System Shutting Down"

# If power was restored before the shutdown kicked in, cancel it.
pr:12345:powerokwait:/sbin/shutdown -c "Power Restored; Shutdown Cancelled"


# Run gettys in standard runlevels
1:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty1
2:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty2
3:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty3
4:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty4
5:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty5
6:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty6

# Run xdm in runlevel 5
# xdm is now a separate service
x:5:respawn:/etc/X11/prefdm -nodaemon

something else...
 

I tried running xdm, kdm, and gdm in linux rescue mode again and found that it didn't work like it did last time. All it does is turn my monitor on and off a few times and then it gives me the prompt again. I don't know if that means anything but I thought I'd just give as much info as I can...

fixed it!
 

I set the run-level to 3 in the inittab to make linux boot into a text login. I then tried to run startx from the prompt but found that it came back with an XIO error 104 and said that my mouse did not exist. I reinstalled linux, this time making sure that the correct mouse was selected and now it runs fine. I realized after the install that I could've simply ran /usr/sbin/mouseconfig and saved myself the trouble of reinstalling, but hey that's life... live and learn I guess.