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Community ▶ Questions ▶ startx complains 'cannot find a free VT'
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startx complains 'cannot find a free VT'

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I'm trying to add enough to the Fedora Core 2 distro to get a vnc server working. I think I have the necessary pieces installed (via yum), but when I do 'startx' it fails with:

xf86OpenConsole: Cannot find a free VT

I looked, and there are plenty of ttys available (32), and the major/minor numbers appear to be correct. Only two are running mingetty, so I do not understand the error…

Hints about where to look would be much appreciated,

Paul

3 Replies

Did you try vncserver instead of startx ?

Yes, I tried that a little after my first post. I have no problems firing up a VNC session, and it works as I would expect. So that kinda makes the original question moot, except from an academic standpoint.

Paul

"startx" would try to start an X server running with the display sent to the servers graphics device. Naturally, you don't have a graphics device and so the server fails ("cannot find a free VT").

VNCserver is an X server where the display is a "network" and so doesn't try to connect to a physical graphics device.

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