[CentOS] Re: gdm won't start

[Josh Kelley]

On 1/16/06, Josh Kelley <joshkel at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm trying to set up a new CentOS 4.2 desktop, and gdm refuses to
> start.  It blanks the screen, displays the swirling blue circle mouse
> cursor that appears to be an hourglass equivalent, then drops back to
> the console window.  It repeats this several times then displays the
> following error:
>
> The display server has been shut down about 6 times in the last 90
> seconds, it is likely that something bad is going on.  I will wait for
> 2 minutes before trying again on display :0.

I finally figured out what was wrong. 
/etc/pango/i386-redhat-linux-gnu/pango.modules was only readable by
root (permissions set incorrectly by the installer, perhaps?), so
gdmgreeter wasn't able to run.  I ended up looking through strace's
output to figure this out; annoyingly, gdmgreeter wrote informative
error messages to stderr, but gdm apparently discarded the output. 
(If it logged it anywhere, I couldn't find it.)

Josh Kelley