HELP Xserver cannot start

[James Tappin]

On Fri, 16 Sep 2005 08:02:01 -0400
"alves5 at cantv.net" <alves5 at cantv.net> wrote:

AN> I have Hoary on my box. Some days ago I started having trouble with
AN> Gnome. When starting, it would report trouble loading some desktop
AN> program and asked whether it should be reloaded or not. That
AN> happened about four times.
AN> 
AN> Now when I boot it shows a blue (!) screen with a gray box that
AN> says: "I cannot start the X server (your graphical interface). [...]
AN> Would you like to view the X server output to diagnose the problem?"
AN> No matter what I answer, it freezes there.
AN> 
AN> As far as I can see, it goes thru the boot process with no error,
AN> except that the screen goes black 3 times, which I hadn't noticed
AN> before.
AN> 
AN> I can enter in recovery mode and I have Hoary's installation CDs,
AN> 
AN> How can I fix this?

Bit of a shot in the dark here. 

This kind of problem is often caused by a full hard drive. Try:

1) Go to a text console (Ctrl-Alt-F1).
2) Login there.
3) df -k
4) Check if any partitions (especially / and /home have a usage of
100%).
5a) If / (or /var if that is a separate position) is full then do "sudo
apt-get clean"
5b) If /home is full you'll need to look for what's filling it up and
delete it.
6) Logout
7) Go back to the X screen (Ctrl-Alt-F7) and try again.

James

-- 
+------------------------+-------------------------------+---------+
| James Tappin           | School of Physics & Astronomy |  O__    |
| sjt at star.sr.bham.ac.uk | University of Birmingham      | --  \/` |
| Ph: 0121-414-6462. Fax: 0121-414-3722                  |         |
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