Bug 90054

I was reading /etc/X11/prefdm to see what happens when booting (found reference 
to it in the redhat reference docs at www.redhat/docs)

I manually set DISPLAYMANAGER="GNOME" in /etc/sysconfig/desktop and 
ran /etc/X11/prefdm from the command line and the same thing happened as whe I 
boot up

I changed to DISPLAYMANAGER="KDE" and again ran /etc/X11/prefdm from the 
command line and a login prompt appeared.  I logged in and got a KDE desktop

I went to /var/log/gdm but those log files don't say much (and certainly not 
any errors) so I don't know how to fix my system, but it seems that it is a 
gnome issue

The --rebuilddb error message is harmless.

Off to gdm to try to sort out the rest ...

There's no need to guess at where the issue is; the error message 
says:

No fonts found; this probably means that the fontconfig
library is not correctly configured. You may need to
edit the fonts.conf configuration file. More information
about fontconfig can be found in the fontconfig(3) manual
page and on http://fontconfig.org

it sounds like your system is badly hosed (missing files and such). 
I can't speculate on how it got that way, rpm --force and up2date -f may 
have contributed, but whatever got it that way seems to be the problem, the
software that relies on the files isn't broken.

Try "rpm -Va" to see what's wrong, assuming the rpm db isn't confused. I'd try
just reinstalling fontconfig for this immediate problem but with so 
many other problems I'm not sure it's going to help, you're going to 
get lots of instability.

redhat-config-xfree86 doesn't require glade2, it requires .glade data files
found in the r-c-xfree86 package... that one worries me.

I'll try running rpm -Va

I've already tried reinstalling fontconfig with rpm -Uvh fontconfig --force 
with no apparant effect

I'll also try reinstalling redhat-config-xfree86 

Please try to avoid --force. If the rpm won't install without --force, you 
need to fix the error messages by addressing the dependency problems 
mentioned, not by adding --force. Otherwise all bets are off.

If I don't use --force to install an rpm that is already installed, it just says that rpm is already 
up-to-date 
 
Is there another way to reinstall an rpm?  Or do I need to go through the dependancy dance to 
remove it prior to reinstalling it? 

I reinstalled redhat-config-xfree86 with --force (I don't yet know of another way to reinstall a 
package that rpm thinks is already installed) 
 
When I run redhat-config-xfree86 I get: 
* ddcprobe returned bogus values: 
ID:   None 
Name: None 
HorizSync: None 
VertSync:  None 
 
Traceback (most recent call last): 
  File "/usr/share/redhat-config-xfree86/xconf.py", line 403, in ? 
    import gtk.glade 
ImportError: No module named glade 
 
 
I've been here before .. previously I reinstalled all the packages that included the words python 
and glade 
 
I did a rpm -Va > rpmsVa.txt and looked at that file, but I don't really know what to look for .. a 
search for error came up with nothing 

Here is a list of things from rpm -Va that might be of interest (they are the only things that 
looked like error messages) 
 
missing    /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so 
missing    /var/www/html/usage 
missing    /var/www/html/usage/msfree.png 
missing    /var/www/html/usage/webalizer.png 
missing    /usr/lib/libpq.so.2.0 
missing    /etc/rc.d/rc2.d/K10webmin 
missing    /etc/rc.d/rc2.d/S99webmin 
missing    /etc/rc.d/rc3.d/K10webmin 
missing    /etc/rc.d/rc3.d/S99webmin 
missing    /etc/rc.d/rc5.d/K10webmin 
missing    /etc/rc.d/rc5.d/S99webmin 
 
 

Can you just attach the rpm -Va output? There's a link on this page 
that says "Create a New Attachment", use that to attach the output.

"man rpm" says how to interpret the letter codes by each file:
       S file Size differs
       M Mode differs (includes permissions and file type)
       5 MD5 sum differs
       D Device major/minor number mis-match
       L readLink(2) path mis-match
       U User ownership differs
       G Group ownership differs
       T mTime differs

5 and S (md5sum or size differs) are bad news, for everything except 
configuration files.

You're right that to reinstall an already-installed package you may need
--force, I was concerned about broken dependencies.

Created attachment 91595 [details]
output from rpm -Va

You probably already knew that there would be S and 5 listings in this output 
 
Could you help me figure out what packages I should reinstall to get the gnome gui (and gdm) 
working? 
 
I can work on the other non-essential packages myself later 
 
 

I would describe your system as deeply hosed; in particular the C library has
all the md5sums wrong. At this point there's definitely not a GNOME bug. 
There may be a bug in whatever caused the system to be hosed, but that 
would need to be tracked down. There's a good chance it's a bad hard drive 
or something.

You could reinstall everything in the GNOME and X components (see 
/usr/share/comps/i386/comps.xml).

Personally, I would not do that, because your C library and many other things 
are messed up, which might mean the reinstall won't even work right.

I would suggest reinstalling from scratch after backing up your personal data
files. I'd also get some hardware test tools like memtest86 or 
if you can find something for disks, and run those.

For help with all this you should really go to the mailing lists, since it's 
more of a support issue than a bug.