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I was running the sawfish/gnome desktop on a PII dual processor with an ATI Rage 128 video card -- custom 7.1 install with both gnome and kde installed. Suddenly, the screen flashed black and after a few more screen flashes I was back in the gdm login. Checkin /var/log/messages, I found the message: Apr 18 03:05:41 chaos gnome-name-server[19761]: input condition is: 0x11, exiting. This has happened more than a few times for me but I do not see anything consistant about it.
Do you have anything in ~/.xsession-errors after this happens? (But before logging in again.)
I will have to wait until it happens again to take a look. This is not a bug I can cause to happen on demand.
I have had this exact same problem a number of times (same log message in /var/log/messages). I cannot reproduce it at will. It is unpredictable. I am also using an "ATI Technologies Inc 3D Rage Pro AGP 1X/2X".
Bug 39233 ( http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=39233 ) sounds very similar to this one. For now, I have changed my init to start up in run level 3 instead of 5. Then I login and use 'startx'. I will see if it crashes anymore.
Using 'startx' instead of 'gdm' did not solve the problem. So, I ran 'Xconfigurator --preferxf3'. I have not had any problems since. Perhaps there is a bug in the 4.x Xfree driver for ATI cards.
Apparently a duplicate of 39233. I think the gnome-name-server stuff is just the name server getting killed when X crashes. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 39233 ***