Apologies to the petrolheads out there for whom this will be gobbledegook, but I’ll try to make this comprehensible as I hope it will help others travelling the ‘net. My home server appeared to break itself while I was away this weekend. That may seem like an outrageous claim, but really – it was fine, I switched it off, I went away, I switched it on again, and it was broken.

Being a scientific sort, I’d better define broken. It booted, but the graphical user interface (GUI) wouldn’t start. It turns out that last week I applied a yum update (a bit like Windows update) which updated the X server (the graphical interface part of the server). This wasn’t properly tested for a hardware configuration similar to mine, and it broke everything. :(

A bit of internet research soon showed that other people had suffered the same problem, and today a kind soul has posted i386 fix instructions. I’ve adapted these for x86_64 users (like me):

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=215255#13

Honk honk!