X Server problems on Fedora Core 3

[Rick Stevens]

On Wed, 2005-10-12 at 06:25 -0700, John Reynolds wrote:
> Rick Stevens opened the Vault of Knowledge and brought forth:
> 
> >
> >On Tue, 2005-10-11 at 14:28 -0700, John Reynolds wrote:
> >> Hello.
> >> 
> >> I had a system crash during an up2date session.  The GUI is a casualty.
> >> 
> >> When the system tries to boot into the GUI mode, it goes blank, puts up 
> a 
> >> message about a failure to start : the fixed font is not found and 
> >> unix:/7100 server is not found.  I put it into text mode startup, 
> rebooted 
> >> and tried again.
> >
> >That's the X font server not running.  Try "service xfs start".  Also
> >make sure you run "chkconfig --level 5 xfs on" to ensure it'll start
> >the next time run level 5 (GUI) is started.
> 
> That fixed it: ran both, reset inittab to level 5, and rebooted.  And when 
> it came back, the mouse driver was functioning again and the GUI came up 
> clean.
> 
> I had run xfs from the init.d directory, instead of using the service 
> command; I didn't think that made the difference.  I have a hunch that the 
> chkconfig straightened whatever was bent.  What file(s) does that groom? I 
> like to understand the mechanisms, not just the commands, it improves the 
> troubleshooting.

"service whatever start" does exactly what "/etc/rc.d/init.d/whatever
start" does.  The "service" command is just a shell script.

"chkconfig" looks at the top of the files in /etc/rc.d/init.d and looks
for the "chkconfig:" line:

	# chkconfig: 2345 55 25

The "2345" indicates what run levels this is appropriate for (a "-" can
also be used for "2345".  The "55" indicates what sequence should be
assigned when entering the run level (in this case, "S55whatever") and
the "25" indicates the sequence when exiting the run level
("K25whatever").

> Many thanks!

"That's what we're here for!" (c)2005, Red Hat Install List :-)

----------------------------------------------------------------------
- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-    "Hello. My PID is Inigo Montoya.  You `kill -9'-ed my parent    -
-                     process.  Prepare to vi."                      -
----------------------------------------------------------------------