Gnome freezes just after it loads

["Scott Campbell" <scott campbell crc ca>]

Hi,

 

I am running Linux 7.2, and have had a really hard time with getting Gnome to load. - I've since gotten it to work, but it seams really weird, I'm just wondering if anyone else has had this problem.

I've been reading through the "gnome freezes up frequently" threads but this seams to be a different problem since in my case it freezes right away.

 

Here is what was happening:

Every time I run startx, everything seems to be going good, I get the little RedHat/Gnome splash screen saying its loading everything. This finishes (its says its done) and the splash screen goes away, but then it just hangs, (mouse, keyboard, network - everything) . All I'm left with is the blue background color. Also, it doesn't hang right away, the time varies from 0-25 seconds after the splash screen is done.

I've looked at the XFree86.log and also did an strace on the startx process but neither told be anything I could use.

 

After many, many hours of trying things, and installing rpms, I discovered that the only time it actually works is when the CD-ROM drive is mounted - there doesn't need to be a CD in the drive. I suspect it might be something with the automount, but I turned it off during the boot process (I just removed the link in the rc3.d folder to autofs), but it still froze - however, I still suspect the cdrom drive has something to do with it since when gnome does load, the first thing that appears after gnome starts is that automount popup window. (which I always say no to anyway)

 

so all I have done to make it work every time I start the computer is put a line in the rc.local that mounts the cdrom drive. It does the trick but I'm still  curious as to what's happening, and thought there might be a patch available.

 

Has anyone had a similar problem and knows what's going on?

 

Thanks,

Scott