Issues with RHGB and broken xorg.conf files

Philip Prindeville philipp at enteka.com
Fri Jun 17 17:27:47 UTC 2005


I was wondering what would be involved in making
the "graphical boot" procedure more robust....

I was working with a variety of dual-head monitors
trying to get two screens working, and managed to
make a typo in the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file.

When the system froze up and needed to be rebooted,
of course, I got the "Configuring kernel parameters:"
message and then it hung.

Apparently it tries to start up an X server, fails,
and then... well, that's all she wrote.

This doesn't seem very robust.  Failing to start the
X server shouldn't be a fatal error.  At the very
least, it should kick out an error message (like
"Starting X server [ FAILED ]") and behave as if
$GRAPHICAL=no...  so that one can get into the system
and repair the damage, then restart the X server.

So, as a result, I routinely set GRAPHICAL=no on all
new installs... and will continue to until the boot
process has this Achilles Heel removed.

Am I alone in my thinking?  Doing a scan of various
forums reveals that this is not an uncommon occurrence.

-Philip







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