I have Red Hat 7.0 on an Intel Acer machine (128MB RAM, 10 GB HDD). The box was up and ok. Then, I used Linuxconf to change the boot mode to 'text and network' instead of 'graphics and network' and saved. I rebooted. Text mode came up fine. But just when I try to log-in, screen starts blinking and I error messages saying something like ' gdm was running but has been somehow murdered... ' then something about 'gdm.pid ...' and the system reboots. I don't even get time to do 'ps -ef | grep gdm' and kill it or like that. I don't know why gdm is starting in the first place. It should not in text mode, right ? And I am not able to debug or do anything as the system reboots within 20 seconds of booting up.
Hmm. Not sure what linuxconf does if you choose that, I'll ask. In the meantime to get running again, type "linux 1" at the boot: prompt to start in single-user mode, edit the file /etc/inittab, change the line "id:5:initdefault:" to have a 3 instead of a 5.
My initdefault is 5. Card is i810. I frequently get the "murdered" message when I switch to a tty and then try to return to X. Sometime X is there, sometime it's not and I get a new X login and all my open apps are vanished. Sometime X is F9 instead of F7. I don't know if my problem is due to gdm (as the error message seems to indicate) or to XFree4.0.1 having problems after a tty switch (like other bug reports suggests, ie bug 18651)
I have found why using Linuxconf causes problems for me. Basically, the default X-server that came could give only 640x480 resolution as it couldn't detect the video ram on my i82815 based agp card. So, I had download the X-server from Intel's site (its XFCom_i810) and linked /usr/X11R6/bin/XF86_SVGA to it and also linked /etc/X11/X to /usr/X11R6/bin/XF86_SVGA. Then, everything was fine. However, when I used Linuxconf again, it resetted my custom settings and hence I was getting the problem.
Merging with other 'gdm murdered' bugs *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 23259 ***