Dr Eva Myers wrote:
> GNOME has suddenly stopped working on one of my machines running Scientific
> Linux 3.0.5.  When I reboot the machine, everything is OK until it tries to
> run gdm, and then the screen flashes for a while before finally displaying
> an error message "Failed to start the display server several times in a
> short time period".  If I edit /etc/sysconfig/desktop so that the machine
> runs kdm or xdm instead, then the login banner is displayed, but users who
> run GNOME cannot log in (users who do not run GNOME can, so it isn't an X
> problem).

the best way to search for problem in linux is log files:
/var/log/messages, or /var/log/X*.0.log


also, gnome other subsystems, so maybe when you've installed your 
package, it somehow removed a service gnome requires from the proper 
/etc/rc?.d/

good luck.
Max.


> 
> I am not aware of having changed anything relevant recently.  I have the
> nightly yum update enabled, and recently I tried unsuccessfully to install
> the MASS 7 library for Splus (http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/MASS4/ - I'd be
> surprised if this was relevant, but I mention it anyway just in case).  In
> the course of trying to get MASS 7 working, I ran synaptic and installed
> java-1.4.2-sun-compat, but these were the only recent changes.
> 
> Dr Eva Myers
> Computer Officer, Statistical Laboratory.
> 


-- 
Maxim Kovgan
Distributed Systems & Data Mining Lab
Computer Science
Technion, 32000, Haifa
ISRAEL
phone# (+972)-(4-829)3864