Unable to start X

[Rick Stevens]

On Sun, 2006-03-19 at 17:44 -0700, brad.mugleston at comcast.net wrote:
> Thanks everyone for your help - it turned out to be a lack of
> disk space....  I cleaned things up and it now works.

Lots of things break with low disk space.  Since xfs uses Unix sockets
(which have a chunk on the filesystem) and the session manager writes
stuff to /tmp, it's no wonder you'd have issues with no disk space.

> BTW is there an easy way to set the run level other than editing
> the file?  I'm thinking of a set type command.

"telinit 3" would switch you to run level 3.  Also appending the run
level to the end of the "kernel" line in grub works at boot:

	...root=LABEL=/ rhgb quiet 3

If you want to query the user at boot, you can add some code to the
/etc/rc.d/rc script around line 45 to ask the user.  I've never done
this, but a potential bit of code would be:

	# Get first argument. Set new runlevel to this argument.
	[ -n "$argv1" ] && runlevel="$argv1"

	# Query user for desired runlevel...
	VAL=""
	echo -n "Enter desired run level (1-5) [$runlevel]: "
	read VAL
	if [ X$VAL != "X" ]; then
	    runlevel=$VAL
	fi

The first two lines are from the file.  The remainder are courtesy of
yours truly.

CAUTION: I've not done this, so try it at your own peril!  Make a copy
of the file before you edit it and have a rescue CD ready to pull this
junk out if it doesn't work.  You have been warned!
----------------------------------------------------------------------
- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-             To iterate is human, to recurse, divine.               -
----------------------------------------------------------------------