After a clean installation of beta2, gdm failed to start. The background image appeared, but at the point that the login dialog should have appeared, it died and respawned the X server. It continued to do this over and over until I rebooted the system. The log in /var/gdm/ indicated that the connection to the server was refused (I don't have the exact text onhand).
pbrown - this is the problem I was telling you about where the 75DPI fonts are not being installed. GDM is looking for helvetica and not finding it. We are going to patch GDM to default down to other fonts but this is a problem with those fonts not being installed moreso a GDM problem
*** Bug 13021 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
getting the same problem here.., but XFree86-75dpi-fonts IS installed and "xfs" IS running gdm just restarts, while xdm works fine (didn't test kdm BTW) on /var/gdm there is a core file of "gdmlogin" (signal 11) the message on /var/gmd/0:Log tells : could not open default font 'fixed'
It seems that the XFree86-75dpi-fonts postinstall script fails to add it to the xfs fontpath. I inserted it in /etc/X11/fs/config like this: catalogue = /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc:unscaled, /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi, /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc, /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1, gdm seems to work after doing this.
This was fixed in the 0.29+ XFree86 packages; the %post scripts for the fonts were missing.