I've never seen such a thing on Linux before. Looks like Redhat
may have finally caught up with Microsoft.
I've no clue what is going on here, but its happened on three
very different systems, multiple times:
Dual Pentium-Pro200 with ATI Rage II video card.
PIII-500 with GeForce2 video
P4 Celeron 1.8G with Matrox G200 video.
Basically I'm using X and things seem to work. I logout of X
(runlevel 3 is my default) and eventually when I use X again with
startx it will have self-destructed putting up empty or
unreadable error dialog boxes. Killing it with Ctrl-Alt-BS is
all I can do.
The only way I've been able to fix it is on one of the other
systems I did tar -cpf Xfix.tar .g* .met* and ftp'd the tar file
to the broken system where after tar -xpf Xfix.tar X works
again. I first discovered this by restoring the home directory
from backup and noting that this fixed the X server problem, then
when it happened again I starting restoring just what I thought
was the gnome directories.
At first I thought it was a buggy screensaver module, but I've
seen this self-destruction when running X as root where the
screensaver doesn't work.
All RedHat patches available as of 28DEC02 have been installed.
Basically the machines are file servers and seem very reliable in
this role. I use X mostly to try a few new things -- like Xine
or Kino that I'm intrested in, but aren't yet where they'd be
really useful to me -- or run xcdroast to backup the key data
directories. Running or not running xcdroast doesn't seem to
correlate with the last working X session.
--wally.