X Server problems on Fedora Core 3

[John Reynolds]

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.

Many thanks!

John Reynolds
IBM-by-the-Bay
San Francisco CA