System appears to hang at boot after installing KDE Desktop on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6

Solution In Progress - Updated -

Issue

On a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.x system, the KDE Desktop group is installed with the command:

# yum groupinstall "KDE Desktop"

The /etc/inittab file is updated to set the default run level to 5, and the system is rebooted.

At boot, the system appears to hang, showing Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 6.x as shown in this screenshot:

Image showing system appearing to hang on boot

Alternatively, if the Escape key is pressed during the boot to show the boot progress, the system will appear to hang, and show something similar to this screenshot:

Image showing system appearing to hang on boot (if escape is pressed during boot process)

The system will indefinitely stay on this screen. The server is still accessible by SSH, and it is still possible to switch to a different virtual terminal and login by pressing CTRL+ALT+F2, CTL+ALT+F3, etc.

The /var/log/messages file shows:

Aug 15 17:20:24 rhel6-host kdm[1906]: X server "/usr/bin/X" cannot be executed
Aug 15 17:20:24 rhel6-host kdm[1881]: X server for display :0 cannot be started, session disabled

Environment

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.x

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