Yesterday, whilst watching a bunch of updates, I noticed a long delay while Evolution was updated. Since I don't use it, I selected it for removal. I clearly got something badly wrong. The dependency chain must have contained something decidedly odd. On booting this morning, I was faced with a text 'screen', cursor quietly blinking at 0,0.

/etc/inittab reads id:5:initdefault:, which AFAIK is as it should be. Eventually I pulled up another terminal and found that file, tried init 5 to no avail. I tried startx and was shown a very unfamiliar Window manager (twm). Of course I didn't know gdm was missing then. A Fedora Forum suggestion led me to this post, which resolved the difficulty. Seems that my gay abandon in deleting some of the dependencies for Evolution had removed quite a few of the Gnome related packages.

$ yum groupinstall "GNOME Desktop Environment" 

That worked, though it was possibly overkill. For one it re-installed the pulseaudio module which screwed my sound up. Luckily it's been fixed meanwhile, so no problems there. I didn't realise just how much I'd become dependent on the graphical side of Linux! Or just how ignorant I was of the boot process. Ah well, alls well that ends well.

I'm comparing this with the service that M$ users are getting over the recent viruses in IE?