gpm autologin was broken in rawhide; it's now fixed. If you do
something like:
yum -y install gpm --nogpgcheck
..it should fix it.
Using yum to (re)install gdm did get beyond the earlier stall --
though I had to first press <esc> to "awaken" the login window, and
follow that by clicking on "soas user" to actually launch the login.
This shows the vulnerability of the login process to a "single point
of failure". When 'gdm autologin' broke, the user was *not* being
offered any opportunity to bring up the gui any other way (once the
gdm had stalled, even startx from a text console did not work).
mikus