odd problems with Gnome

[dsp2267]

HI all, I'm experiencing an odd problem that has me stumped.

I am trying to load CentOS 6 on a home PC. The install goes fine, and after reboot into runlevel 3 the system seems to work fine. However, I can't get to a Gnome desktop.

system details;

• motherboard = ASRock 880GMH/USB3
• onboard video = ATi Radeon HD 4250

install details;

• CentOS 6.0 x64
• chose Basic Server install
• yum install fglrx (ATi driver from ELRepo)
• yum install "X Window System" "GNOME Desktop Environment"

symptoms;

• boot into runlevel 3 works fine
• startx from command line results in a plain desktop with just Computer, "root's Home", and Trash icons - no taskbar or other desktop goodies, "Open in Terminal" doesn't launch an x-term
• boot into runlevel 5 hangs

I am guessing the problem has to do with X and/or Gnome, since startx can sorta kinda startup X Windows on the console. But I don't have any experience troubleshooting window managers/environments.

Can someone get me started on the debugging process?

thanx

[MikeTbob]

Hello and Welcome.
My first guess would be to ask you if you verified the download and did you perform the DVD/CD disk checker? It seems to me that the install was incomplete.
http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/ins...ll-cd-dvd.html

Have you tried startx as a regular user and not as root?

[dsp2267]

I have not run an MD5 checksum, but I used the built-in media checker in Anaconda. No problems.

Just tried startx as a regular user, same result.

/root/install.log has 1125 lines, ending with "*** FINISHED INSTALLING PACKAGES ***".

a "grep -i gnome /root/install.log | wc -l" gives 51 lines, so there are a whole bunch of Gnome packages that were installed.
a "grep -i x11 /root/install.log | wc -l" gives 12 lines.

[dsp2267]

Just ran MD5 checksums of the ISOs (discs 1 & 2 of the x64 full install), both check out OK.

[dsp2267]

Just set SELinux to Permissive and re-tried startx, same result.

[MikeTbob]

I would try deleting the /home/username/.gnome* directory and see if Gnome rebuilds itself.

[dsp2267]

Interesting idea, but no luck. Gnome did recreate ~/.gnome2, but same results as before.

[atreyu]

You may have missed some other required packages when you started with Basic and then installed the Gnome stuff (yum should have gotten everything but maybe it didn't). My suspicion is the gdm package or something xauth-related. Is there anything in /var/log/messages? or /var/log/Xorg.0.log or ~/.xsession-errors?

[dsp2267]

I've wiped CentOS and loaded Fedora 15 (twice actually, once with Gnome 3 and then with KDE), with nearly identical anaconda choices (no, didn't use Kickstart); no problems. My theory, based on trial & error as well as a few web pages scattered around the Interweb, is that there's an ugly interaction between the fglrx driver and KVM. fglrx apparently steps on the normal Xorg/Gnome sequence of events. I mucked around with xorg.conf but could never make it happy with the display. Somewhere I saw mention of an issue with fglrx+KVM on older kernels. I'm not going to try sorting that out. I should note that I tried RHEL6.1, CentOS6.0, and SL6.0, and had the same lack of success.

The purpose of my install was to put a RHEL6-alike on bare metal to run KVM, and then have CentOS6 VMs for practicing for RHCE. Since I have successfully got F15KDE running, with KVM, and have created a CentOS6 VM complete with Gnome running, I'm punting on the fglrx thing...

Thanx all for the help, brace yourselves for a slew of KVM questions over the next few days...

[deep27ak]

first of all I would like to know is there any package for GNOME?

#rpm -qa | grep gnome

and if you don't have any relative package just install them using yum

#yum groupinstall "GNOME Desktop Environment"

#yum -y install gnome*