root partiton mounts as ro, causes gdm and X problems

[dank06]

Hi all

I'm currently on Xubuntu Hardy and the problem is that the X server does not run by default at boot.

Instead, the following appears:

Could not start the X server (your graphical environment) due to some internal error. [...] Please restart gdm when the problem is corrected.

I investigated a little bit and found out my root partition mounts as read only for some reason, even though it appears to be error free by running e2fsck

So to start the X server, i must

dank06@dank06-desktop on tty1
# sudo mount -o remount -rw /dev/sda1 / 
# sudo gdm
!!!GDM is already running. ABORTING!!!
# sudo startx

Alright, so the X server is started now on display 1 (ctrl+alt+F8 ), but as root, so I Logout of the graphical environment and return to

dank06@dank06-desktop on tty1
Stopping X
# sudo gdm

And now the default greeter is up on display 1

Previously, I was having file permissions errors with the gdm directory (/var/lib/gdm) being set to root root xrw-r--r- but I've fixed that.
There is one error I'm not sure of in the syslog:

May 23 10:26:18 dank06-desktop gdm[10484]: GLib-CRITICAL: g_hash_table_lookup_extended: assertion `hash_table != NULL' failed 
May 23 10:26:18 dank06-desktop gdm[10484]: WARNING: Request for invalid configuration key daemon/ConsoleNotify=true

Is this maybe causing something?

I'm sure the root partition permissions errors is what is causing the X server not to start.
Here is /etc/fstab/

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
proc            /proc           proc    defaults        0       0
# /dev/sda1 as UUID=08a5288d-e29e-440e-8c4f-c2ae117445f4
/dev/sda1       /               ext3    realtime,errors=remount-ro 0       1
# /dev/sda5 as UUID=2c4a7724-e824-442f-ae26-768b56a24b1a
/dev/sda5       none            swap    sw              0       0
/dev/scd0       /media/cdrom0   udf,iso9660 user,noauto,exec,utf8 0       0
/dev/scd1       /media/cdrom1   udf,iso9660 user,noauto,exec,utf8 0       0
/dev/fd0         /media/floppy0  auto    rw,user,noauto,exec,utf8 0       0

[devils casper]

Why are you using sudo? Have you tried to restart X Sever as Regular User?

startx

[dank06]

I use sudo, otherwise I get something like:

xauth: ~/.Xauthority not writiable, changes will be ignored
xauth: error in locking authority file ~/.Xauthority

Also, I don't want to just startx because there are multiple users on the system (the X session logs in to the current user's session of course), so I need to use the greeter application too and to execute that, you need to sudo

But that's not the major issue really ... it's more that /dev/sda1 mounts as read only