INIT Messages

I installed a RH7.3 system and last week when I upgraded the compiler from GCC 2.96 to GCC 3.2 the Qt libs and stuff stopped working and caused all sorts of problems. I ended up removing the Qt, and GTK (GTK, GDK, ATK, Pango, ...) libs and headers and all from the system and recompiled each using GCC 3.2. All seems to be fine except in the process I broke KDE and KDM so the graphical login is gone now. That's not a big deal since I can use the consol login no problem (Actually prefer it on some days) and never really used KDE, use blackbox instead. The thing that is bugging me is that since those broke, now every five minutes or so I get a message displayed on the screen that says:

INIT: ID "x" respawning too fast. disabled for 5 minutes.

I have no clue what it's talking about when it says that so I have no idea how to go about fixing it. It is becomming rather annoying because it keep overwriting my prompts and is filling up my logwatch emails. Does anyknow know what this could be from and a possible fix?

I'm thinking it has something to do with X, but as far as I can tell, X can be totally shutdown and I still get the message.

It's probably bitching about the graphical login that's trying to respawn when you boot but failing. It's starting and failing rapidly, so eventually it just basically gets bolixed and you get that irritating scenario.

In /etc/inittab, there's a series of lines like:

The number in the left column is the "x" that it refers to in the error. Comment out the offending "x" line and then test the system from the command line. You'll have to look through your /var/log/messages to figure out which program is blowing up (probably your graphical log in) and then you'll need to fix it or disable it completely. I hate to be negative, but this happened to me once and it was a serious pain in the arse fixing it (different problem - same symptoms).

Also, read the manpage for /etc/inittab for some extra info.

Thanks a bunch. Looked it there and it was right there. Commented out that line for the login and all is working great. I'll probably just use the console login seeing as how sometimes I don't want X to start up.

I need to figure out what these different config files are for someday. Most the answers seem to be in them. Just now figuring out shell scripting.

Hmmm... you probably ought to fix whatever's causing the problem (check /var/log/messages ... too lazy to scroll the window to see if I already said that...). It's possible (probable) that a library got smashed and it could mess something else up.

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Files of interest:

/etc/inittab
/etc/X11/XF86Config (and it's more common variant)
/etc/hosts
/etc/passwd
/etc/cron*
/etc/rc*
/etc/ld.so.conf
/etc/mime.types

Those are the ones I can rattle off the top of my head... there are, of course, many more, and, depending on what you use on the machine, that could be a very meager list. But it's a good starting point for studying the configuration of things in the system.
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