X11 and CDE won't start

[Douglas A Brown]

Hi, I've searched high and low and haven't found a solution.

I have a server that had HP11.11 installed but no graphics card, which I added. The graphics card appears to work, but for some reason I cannot get CDE to start on bootup. Since I have another 11.11 system that DOES start I tried comparing the 2 but most configuration files are either identical or only different where they need to be (different video definitions for the different cards).

The big difference is X isn't starting on the "new" server on startup, which I assume CDE (the dtlogin process) needs to actually display the screen. When I boot, only 2 dt processes are running- drlogin and dtrc. No X processes are running at all. On the "old" box there are 12 dt-related processes and one X process running on boot.

My gut feeling is that dt is reliant on X running BEFORE dtlogin starts, but it isn't happening. As such, the monitor shows "no signal", even though the keyboard is "live".

What's frustrating is I can run X manually from a telnet session (run startx) which turns on the console monitor, with a telnet-type session. The keyboard and mouse work fine at this point. But still, no CDE.

I'm positive I just have a config file either missing or that has X disabled, but for the life of me can't find it. There are no errors in the /var/dt/Xerrors file (it's empty) and running dr_dt shows nothing unusual (there are 4 Warnings which also exist on the server that works).

Oh, and to answer questions that might get asked, the system is in runlevel 3, and I have the latest Xserver cumulative patch (that was necessary to get the video card recognized in the system).

[Antonio Cardoso_1]

Douglas,
a possible cause if you have /etc/resolv.conf configured to use some DNS and you box isn't declared in DNS, you need to setup /etc/nsswitch.conf to allow resolution of your box's hostname through files.
e.g.
hosts: files [NOTFOUND=continue] dns

[Douglas A Brown]

That was one of the first things I tried- mainly because I was having problems with DNS. The DNS problems have been resolved, and the HOSTS portion is set to "files nis dns" anyway (we use NIS here, which is working).

[Patrick Wallek]

Does the /etc/rc.config.d/desktop file look like:

# cat /etc/rc.config.d/desktop
DESKTOP=CDE

There are a couple of other entries in the file, but the DESKTOP is the one to check. If it is not set to CDE then none of the dt will start.

[Alex Glennie]

I think your assumptions are correct ....

try looking at the last line in the/etc/dt/config/Xservers file , if the file doesn't exist try /usr/dt/config/Xservers ...

my guess uncomment the last line and X and CDE will start locally ... it tells X to use the local graphics console on system startup ...

[Douglas A Brown]

I appreciate the help, but none of the above seemed to work. Fortunately the system was not in production and I did the tech version of the 20-lb sledge and reinstalled the OS. The original OS had been installed with no graphics adaptor in the system, so I thought maybe if the OS was installed WITH the Adaptor present it would work, which it did.