No Gnome, but network connection established

[Oak]

I'm sure this is a newbie question.

I'm running Redhat 7.3 and was having some problems with a new ethernet card. I resolved that problem and my network connection was established using dhcp. The connection was working, but when I restarted my pc to confirm the new setup GNOME never loaded.

eth0 was initialized but the gui login of GNOME never came up.

My hostname was changed by the dhcp server from localhost.localdomain to some long string of characters. I know this is the reason why GNOME won't load as I had this happen in the past.

Can anyone help me with this?

I'm very rusty and my Linux book won't help.

[happybunny]

so you are just sitting at a shell prompt? Login and type startx and see what happens.

[Hayl]

you can just add the hostname to your /etc/hosts on the 127.0.0.1 (loopback) line OR change the settings for the dhcp client to _not_ change your hostname. not sure about your system because RH 7.x is very old but the newer dhcpcd daemons do not set the hostname to the one supplied by the dhcp server by default. man dhcpcd shows that the -h option controls this "feature"... the conf fiel for dhcpcd will be somewhere off of /etc.

[Oak]

I managed to solve the problem.

startx wouldn't work.

I set the hostname in /etc/sysconfig/network and then added it as an alias in /etc/hosts

dhcp doesn't seem to like a hostname of localhost.localdomain and the name it gave instead wasn't liked by lpd which in turn wouldn't allow gnome to begin