X server will not load on boot (sessions problem?)
 

When I boot Red Hat ES at a runlevel of 5, X will not completely load. The blue screen comes up, but then an hourglass will display and it will never finish loading. Thus, I cannot even login. I have no errors or warnings in my /var/log/XFree86.0.log. I see nothing that catches my eye in /var/log/messages.

If I boot with a runlevel of 3, login as root and use the command 'startx', I can successfully load X and login. When I logout, I do notice 'error: permissions error in pam_timestamp_check'.

I am not sure if this is related, but I noticed that I am unable to switch users at all. I get the following:
[root@advlnx26 root]# su hermanr
could not open session
[root@advlnx26 root]# su - hermanr
could not open session
[root@advlnx26 root]#

If I try to login to a user directly from the command line I get the following:
-bash: /etc/profile: Permission denied
[I have no name!@advlnx26 490 ~] (Please note that the 490 denotes a release level for a project).

Giving /etc/profile the permissions of 0777 does not change this.

Possible causes:
I did basically two things worth mentioning before this occured.
1) I changed my display to Generic LCD 1024x768 ( was 800 x 600 ).
2) I changed my sendmail.cf file using m4

When the error occured I immediately changed the display settings back to what they were. To rule out a corrupt XFreeConfig file, I copied one from a colleague. However, the behavior is exactly the same with either config.

Anyone have any clue or suggestion to solve thie problem?

Thanks,
Herman Radtke

Try disabling SElinux at boot.........

1. When the grub splash screen is displayed press any key
2. Select the Linux boot choice and press the 'e' key
3. Select the line that starts with 'kernel' and press the 'e' key
4. At the end of the line add a space followed by selinux=0 (zero)
5. When done press the 'Enter' key followed by the 'b' key

If this works and you can log on as a user (not root) then you need to adjust your SElinux policy.

See; http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/selinux-faq-fc3/ for additional help.

Thanks for the reply Lenard. Unfortunately, SELinux is not being deployed on my system. I confirmed this by checking /etc/sysconfig/ and looking for a selinux file. There was none.

Still to be sure, I followed the steps you suggested, but it still did not allow me to switch users.

OK understood...............

Next step after switching users, what happens when you use startx????
Take a look at the users .xsession-errors file

You might want to do (as root of course);

system-config-display --reconfigure --set resolution 1024x768 --set depth 24

You also might want to remove the rhgb portion from your /boot/grub/grub.conf file also.

When I 'startx' from the command line I get no new errors. I was messing with sendmail, and I see errors from there. Nothing that stands out to me however.

Here is the log:
I used redhat-config-xfree86 -reconfig --set-resolution=124x768 --set-depth=24 s
ince system-config-display was not a valid command. However, it set the monitor
to "Unknown" and did not set the DPI. I changed it to the proper settings usin
g the GUI. I also noticed the following message when running that command:
Now that flagged me as being a major problem. However, I checked out /etc/X11/XF86Config and everything checks out fine. However, it continues to show up even when all the settings are correctly set.

I did not see a rhgb portion in my /boot/grub/grub.conf file.

The problem stemmed from the permissions on /etc. They were rwxr--r-- and when I changed them to rwxr--r-- everything began working again.