Tastes Like Chicken

I've been struggling mightily these past few weeks working on a project having to do with streaming video. During the course of my mental thrashings I forced an install of a GTK2 RPM on an RHEL4 box in the hopes that it would help me compile some of the tools that were (and still are) frustrating me. Unfortunately, I made a conscious (though I was probably hungry at the time) decision to ignore the warnings about conflicts and failed dependencies regarding the version of GTK2 I was trying.

Well that wasn't a good idea.

Of course the install went through, and of course the tool compilation later failed. But, stil not thinking clearly, I just plowed on with the work.

A few hours later I noticed something weird – I couldn't open up an xterm. Not putting two and two together (still hungry I guess) I decided it was something innocuous and that a reboot would probably fix it. Uh oh.

Well after the reboot, I was completely horked. Runlevel 5 brought up a blank screen with just the "X" cursor and a message that my greeter program was failing. So I ssh'd in from another machine, changed the runlevel to 3, and rebooted. Ok, a little progress – at least I could log in. Then I tried startx. That brought me to the same issue I had before – the big "X" cursor. The weird thing was, there were no errors at all in the X11 log files. Nothing to give me any clue what was going on. I tried in vain for a few hours to screw around with my xorg.conf, gdm, xdm, anything I could think of.

After about two hours, I discovered that xinit did work. I got an xterm on a black screen at that was it. So from there I tried to start firefox. Firefox failed with an error message talking about a bad shared library. Only then did I remember my faux pais with the RPM install. I popped the Red Hat CD into the drive and installed the original GTK2 RPM. After a reboot, voila – good to go.

So the lesson is – don't ignore the warnings when you are told not to install something. Duh.

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