On 1/16/06, Josh Kelley joshkel@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