So first I setup Fedora Core 8 as a VMWare-instance... But after some playing around, I had the next message:
"Server failed to start !!! Please check errors log for problems"
And guess what... no information at all in the logs 
So removed the packages and the next directories:
/etc/dirsrv
/etc/sysconfig/dirsrv
/var/lock/dirsrv
/var/lib/dirsrv
So no information... then strace will be your best friend 
So I started:
[root@fedora-ds debug]# strace -o ~/debug/setup -ff /usr/sbin/setup-ds.pl
And guess what... I had the error again... So I went to the ~/debug folder on another terminal and did:
[root@fedora-ds debug]# grep "failed" *
setup.31676:read(4, "Server failed to start !!! Pleas"..., 4096) = 64
setup.31676:write(2, "Server failed to start !!! Pleas"..., 64) = 64
setup.31711:write(1, "Server failed to start !!! Pleas"..., 64) = 64
[root@fedora-ds debug]#
When I digged into setup.31711 I found:
read(255, "if test ! -f $STARTPIDFILE ; the"..., 2220) = 663
rt_sigprocmask(SIG_BLOCK, NULL, [], 8)Â = 0
stat64("/var/run/dirsrv/slapd-fedora-ds.startpid", 0xbfcd8eb8) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
rt_sigprocmask(SIG_SETMASK, [], NULL, 
= 0
fstat64(1, {st_mode=S_IFIFO|0600, st_size=0, ...}) = 0
mmap2(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0xb7f7c000
write(1, "Server failed to start !!! Pleas"..., 64) = 64
So this is a nice clue... /var/run/dirsrv... and guess what... the owner of this directory was fedora-ds (a user I set up initially for testing purposes for the Directory Server ) With the comment chown I corrected the owner of this folder... and now service dirsrv start works 
Conclusion... strace is your best friend
