An explanation of at least one circumstance that causes the "respawning too fast" error message and what to do about it.

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Subject: [Bltnewuser] Respawning too fast [WAS: Re: Mozilla Crashing way to kill it quickly..}
  Date: Mon, 08 Jul 2002 18:16:20 +0200
  From: "Stefan Waidele jun." <Stefan@Waidele.net>
    To: Bltnewuser@basiclinux.net

ronnie samuel wrote: > I installed the latest version of mozilla 1.0 on a linux redhat 7.2 box yesterday. Ever since that install of mozilla the X-windows has crashed and i keep getting...."Id "x" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes"

This is not an X11 error message:

init, which is the 'mother of all processes' is in charge of getting the computer going. (I know, this is simplified quite a lot).

Whenever linux is ready for user interaction, init looks at the inittab to find out what programs to start on which (virtual) console. Usually a getty program on each textconsole to let users log in.

Usually those programs are started over again after they finish. And here it comes: Your init starts xdm/kdm/?dm for graphical login. Your X11 crashes (the program terminates/is terminated) and init tries to start it again. In order to break that endless loop, init stops restarting (=respawning) if it is done too fast.

You can try this out by switching to a virtual console pressing <ctrl>+<d> and keep on pressing it. After a while You will get the same message.

But: What can You do?
1. switch to a text-console <ctrl><alt><f1>
2. change the runlevel to some multiuser-network runlevel without X11 or ?dm started. (man init will help You further, I have SuSE and runlevels are defined differently)
3. Try to reconfigure X11 with whichever tool RedHat gives You. (XF86Setup or xf86config are on all distributions, i think)
4. X11 writes error messages to a file (sorry, I have no clue to which). Try to find it and look for some usefull hints.
5. Post again to the list with information/guesses on why X11 crashes.
6. Hang on, You'll get that thing running :-)

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Contributors

• () RandyKramer - 08 Jul 2002
• () StefanWaidele - 09 Jul 2002
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[[Main.RandyKramer#08 Jul 2002][]]

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