Hello! I'm writing this from lynx a text-based browser...it's probably the only fun part of my problem. Redhat can't start X...When I try to log in (usually it automatically starts X and then I can login to gnome from the Gnome logon screen) but now my screen blinks weirdly until Xfree sends an error message and go back to prompt... I'm supposed to be an intermediate noob since it has been a year now that I've been using redhat as my main OS... here's what I did just before this happened :
- I uninstalled openoffice 1.0.1 using rpm -e
-installed the brand new openoffice 1.1 rc4
- in the installation instructions it was advised to untar the tarball into a temporary directory (pointing to /tmp)
so that's what I did. The file size was quiet big and I almost don't have any space left available so I deleted the tarball and the temporary directory right after the openoffice install. Then I decided to delete the whole content of /tmp since it is supposed to be a temporary directory.... all this has been done logged as root.
-then I've tried my new openoffice, tried to install some truetype fonts with an utility called spadmin (in the openoffice directory) logged as a normal user.
-After a shutdown, the screen started to blink and it seemed that Xfree was totally messed up.

please help me!

How can I fix my Xfree ? How to uninstall/reinstall it?

Toshiba laptop
Redhat 9
kernel 2.4.20-20.9


Thanks for your help!

WHAT error is shown?

try reinstall XFree86 RPM,and rerun "xf86config".

Also, try running "fc-cache". That will update the font cache, an error may come up alerting you to a font problem.

thank you for your rapid answer

I forgot to mention the error message :

"[...]
Using config file: "/etc/X11/X86Config"
Could not init font path element unix/:7100, removing from list!
Fatal server error:
could not open default font fixed"


And when I looked at the log : same message at the end of the file (it seems that it's only a font problem) until that:no errors...
It's weird I didn't delete any file...except the /tmp content

I'm trying your suggestions in a few minutes and I will post the results.

Searched Google finding a gazillion hits.

Here's a link to a newsgroup with some help for an older version of RedHat, but may help:
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=e...%2Bfrom%2Blist!%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF-8%26oe%3DUTF-8%26selm%3D3ae6f539_2%2540news.pacifier.com%26rnum%3D4

Here's some of the thread:

X 4.0 has a build-in font server, so i don't think thats the problem
>

Yes, X does have a builtin font server. However, if XF86Config has
errant font paths specified, you can expect this message when running
xfs.

Look in XF86Config for a font path which doesn't exist. For example,
if you are running xfs then you should have something like:

FontPath "unix/:7100"

...depending on what port you assigned to xfs when it was started.

Alternatively, if you have the above line specified but xfs is not
running, you will get the same error message.

Check /etc/X11/fs/config to make sure that the font paths specified
for xfs actually exist, too.

Lastly, if you are running xfs in conjunction with some other font
server, such as xfstt, make sure you have added the appropriate
line for that font server to XF8Config, such as:

FontPath "unix/:7101"

As a sanity test, you can comment all TCP font paths and hard
code absolute paths in the old manner, like:

FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc"

That should always work, assuming the typing was correct and
the fonts are really there. From that point you can troubleshoot
xfs if need be.


Best of luck,
Rich

Hi!

I tried fc-cache , it didn't work
I tried to reinstall XFree86 but I didn't succeed to configure it.

Thanks for the reference rwolson , I checked it out and for sure it is exactly the same problem.

I will reinstall XFree86 and configure it later as I'm pretty busy at the moment. But I won't give up I want to know how it works.

Be sure I'll post the results on this thread.


Thank you guys

I had a similar problem with the X font server. I had error message indicating the system could not reach 'unix/:7100'. After X tried to start up (blinking around 10 times over 2 minutes), I got the error message above, then Linux did come up in terminal mode. Command 'df' showed 100% disk space used. It turns out I was out of disk space and the system probably could not start xfs. I deleted files to get down to 85%, and rebooted. X came up right away. I'm typing on it now!