Mysterious 'startx' failure

[Alexander Volovics]

Hello,

A week ago I installed warty on my inspiron i8100 laptop.
No problems, very nice linux distro!

Being an 'old fashioned' linux user (mostly RH and then FC) I
searched for ways to disable the graphical boot (gdm). I like to boot
into a console, login and then start X with 'startx'.

The only way I could find to do this was to boot to runlevel 3
after disabling /etc/rc.d/S99gdm. (This is not very elegant, surely
there must exist a more elegant way and if not it should be built
into hoary).

This worked perfectly for a week but today 'startx' dropped me
back to the console. X/Gnome won't startup.
The only indications I could find that something might be wrong are
messages concerning the font server:
"Could not init font path element unix:/7100, removing from list".

And a list of warnings about 'font renderers' already being registered
at priority 0. ('.pcf', etc.)

This was the only change I made to the default config. The only other
things I added were updates and I installed some packages (like k3b
(I have some remarks about k3b under warty too, but I will adress those
in another mail)).

So I could have encountered a font server or authentification problem.
As ubuntu/warty's 'internals' are a bit different from RH/FC I find
it difficult to track the problem.

Hints would be appreciated.

Alexander