1. My Linux machine wasn't starting Gnome upon bootup. The error I found in /var/log/XFree86.0.log was:
can't open default font 'fixed'
Tracing back, I noticed that it was using the following config file:
(==) Using config file: "/etc/X11/XF86Config-4
I made the changes to my XF86Config-4 file based on this thread:
http://www.mail-archive.com/fonts@xfree86.org/msg01588.html
And now I can successfully run xstartup once again! :)
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2. My mySQL server wasn't starting up successfully. It was erroring out with this error in the log file (/usr/local/mysql/var/host.log):
Can't start server : Bind on unix socket: Permission denied
Do you already have another mysqld server running on socket: /t
mp/mysql.sock ?
How odd, I am root, and I have no problems writing to /tmp. Turns out that although I was running "mysql.server start" as root, the actual mysqld process was running as the "mysql" user. For some reason, /tmp had been reprotected to 700 permissions. I ran "chmod 777 /tmp" and now mysql starts up fine.
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Addendum:
Duh... The /tmp permissions problem is probably why my xserver didn't start up properly in (1) in the first place!!!
