X will not start at Boot Up but comes up manually

[stangjason]

One day out of the blue LINUX Enterprise 4 would not boot. It worked fine the day before with no problems and the only thing that happened previously was that a button was pressed while booting up but that hasn't been proven to be the problem.

Anyways the current problem stands that X tries to start but only flickers nVidia onto the screen a few times then goes to a black login screen.

btw it also appears that Hald and GDM fails to start now.

Thanks in advance,
Jason

[bidi]

Anyways the current problem stands that X tries to start but only flickers nVidia onto the screen a few times then goes to a black login screen.

Have you taken a look at the log file? If I'm not mistaken RH uses Xorg, which means the log file is: "/var/log/Xorg.0.log". If get quite long, so that a look in it and try to see if you find an error. Usually all errors related to X not starting (specially like what you described) are logged in there.

[stangjason]

I have looked at the /var/log/Xorg.0.log file but it doesn't seem to have anything worse than a few warnings. One of the warnings is "(WW) Open APM failed (/dev/apm_bios) (No such file or directory)" and the rest of the warnings are about supported resolutions with plenty of accepted ones (I get them if needed) but a similar one goes like this "(WW) NVIDIA(1): horizontal sync start (117 not a multiple of 8
(WW) NVIDIA(1): Not using mode "576x384":"

Anyways I did some chasing in the logs and found this error in the /var/log/xdm-errors file:


Symbol __glXgetActiveScreen from module /usr/X11R6/lib64/modules/extensions/libdri.a is unresolved
Symbol __glXgetActiveScreen from module /usr/X11R6/lib64/modules/extensions/libdri.a is unresolved

/etc/X11/xdm/Xsetup_0: line15: command not found xdm errors (pid 10699): fatal IO error 32 (Broken pipe)

[stangjason]

Problem semi-solved. It was found that greeter had a version mismatch with gdm. So instead of being stubborn and taking more time to fix this problem the display manager was switched to KDE so if the next set of updates fixes this problem we might switchback to see if this fixes the problem.