I did find this out in another message here and they are right. This is a missing piece (one of many!) in the text install. Even if you select Gnome as your workstation WIndows environment, not all of Gnome gets in. You still have to do: yum groupinstall "GNOME Desktop Environment" Then edit /etc/inittab file to reflect as shown below id:5:initdefault: ^ This number should be 5.