How can I cause Fedora Linux to show me the GUI login screen?

Question

When I boot Fedora 19, the GUI does not start. I can start it manually, with startx, but this does not unlock my keyring, which is annoying.

This problem started when I tried to move from GNOME to KDE and tried to install KDE and uninstall GNOME, which did not work.

I guess I would like to reinstall GNOME from scratch if I could do so without loss of data.

Solution

Fedora uses, like Arch, the new systemd, so you should be able to start gdm at boot like this:

 sudo systemctl enable gdm

I hope this solves your problem, in light of your vicissitudes.

Comments

[MariusMatutiae]

What are you currently using, kdm, gdm, lightdm...?

[Demi]

I am using GDM right now

[Rich Homolka]

what does runlevel return? What about grep initdefault /etc/inittab In most Linuxes, you start gdm at runlevel 5. Not sure if latter Fedoras change this convention.

[Rich Homolka]

+1 .... mostly for (properly) using vicissitudes

[Demi]

That fails with "no such file or directory"

[Milan Kerslager]

This will not work if system target is not graphical (systemctl set-default graphical.target) and if all GUI related packages are not installed (dnf groupinstall "Fedora Workstation").