Hi!

I'm a linux newbie and I,ve my linux redhat 9 (2.4.20-8)which now boots fine till bringing up eth0, entering runlevel 5 till when it prompt for login at runlevel 3, but then when it's about to start GUI the screen displays nothing, the machine working fine before.

Is it possible that a problem has happened to X-server?

Any help will be appreciated

P.S.

Couldn't fetch troubleshooting information while the system starts so as to identify the source of problem cause I don't know how to switch to runlevel 3 while the machine is booting if there is any possibility of doing that
- or which commands to run at command-line "grub> "
- or which commands to modify kernel arguments before booting all these so as to allow me to login to the machine and sort out the problem

Wasn't tempted to believe that it might be a problem with display adaptor as my screen displays text without any problem only that can't switch to GUI, so it seems to me that it's the XSERVER which fails to respond. Tell me if I'm wrong and help me troubleshoot that problem

Thanks

Stefano

well we are guessing its the /etc/xorg.conf file might it could be some network tool is hanging and you are not actually getting to run the init script to boot into the x server.

2 ways of having a look

1) get a good live cd...this is always good advice...boot it...and look at the hard drive (not the live cd) /var/log/syslog to see how far it progressed

2) assuming you have not got one....you can still boot into linux without the xserver....assuming it is the culprit.

when you see grub press e for edit and arrow down to the kernel line
lets pretend it says

kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=UUID=longstring ro

add single to that line then press enter and b to boot
you will then be at the root login prompt.....unless xorg was NOT the culprit

at this point you have a couple of choices
a) view the log so far with
or run the xorg command line configurer

yours may not be in the same area as mine and choices are

/usr/bin/xorgconfig
/usr/bin/xorgcfg

-------
before you try any of that it would be really handy if you named your onboard video card or video card...make model etc

and do a search of xorg.conf and your video details in case someone already has posted good file that you can cheat off

Hi!

Thanks for your input, I managed to log in as single user with that GRUB "kernel/vmlinuz...... single"

Then I edited inittab file and changed to runlevel 3. While sorting out Xserver problem, my server is back online and at least I can peruze through it using multiuser mode (runlevel 3).

Couldn't locate immediately xorg.conf file (I even used commands like whereis to locate it without success, don't know yet what is name it uses in this machine, although in my other fedora, and other shrike it is xorg.conf). Will continue that tommorow together with finding video card info

That is because RedHat 9 is ancient and before the big switch to Xorg, it still has Xfree86, whose configuration file is XF86Config.

Thanks a lot for your help, I finally managed to use the xorg.conf file from other machine and it worked. So I can now start my x-server.