inittab not working correctly with X
 

Hello All,

I'm running RHEL ES3, Update 4. I recently installed gtk+2.4.4 and all of it's dependencies. I'm having an issue were it is weird and I can't seem to locate what the issue is.

Situation: If I change the inittab to use id:3: it will boot to command line correctly. I then can type in "startx" and the GUI will come up fine. However, if I change the inittab to use id:5: it will not boot to GUI it will keep giving me an error "There seems to be an X Server already running on display :0. Do you want to ....Yes or No".

My question is why can I start X from the command line with "startx", but not with the inittab set to id:5: ?

I tried installing gimp 2.0 and re-install gtk+2.4.4, but not luck, still same issue.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Q

Maybe you have two ways to start the X server on :0 that are active at the same time. For example, you could have (I'm not on Linux right now, so be kind with me on syntax and paths):
- in /etc/inittab: X:5:/usr/X11R6/bin/startx -- :0
- in /etc/inittab: X:5:/usr/sbin/prefdm (which will start X)
- in /etc/rc.d/rc5.d/ : S55dm -> ../init.d/dm (which will start X)
- ... other possibilities depending on patches/updates you applied.

I speak theory here, though, as I'm a Mandrake user, not a RedHat one. I hope this helps anyway.

Yves.

Well I did so trial and error and have come to a conclusion that is has to deal with the GNOME desktop/login GUI. I traced the init and inittab and other scripts and found out that by Default Linux will load GNOME. I changed this to Default to XDM and it will come up all the time, but when I change it back to GNOME I get the above error.

I also tried to see if X was already started, but I could not find it. Or atleast maybe I'm not looking correctly. The process I would take would be to boot to Text (inittab set to 3). Then I would look at all process with "ps - ef", but could not see an X process running. The funny thing is if I type in "startx", GNOME login GUI will come up correctly, though it starts with a black background instead of the usually blue. But, if I type in "gdm" it will get the above error stating X is already running. I have also noticed that it sometimes complain/errors about the Bluecurve theme. So it is possible that the themes could have been corrupted. I tried re-installing GNOME, but still same results.

So my question then is how does "startx" process differ from "gdm". I tried tracing the two different process, but I would get confused and loose track. So if someone could explain it to me that would be awesome.

So for the time being I'm using XDM until I can sort the GNOME out.

Thanks,
QT