blank virtual console?
hello there.
i just newly installed red hat 9.0, dual-booting with winxp. xp and the linux desktop work fine. however, when i try to do a Ctrl-Alt-F1 (or f2, f3) to get to a virtual console, all i get is a blank screen. nada. this goes on for a long time until i get impatient and just ctrl-alt-delete twice to restart. i've tried thrice and got the same result. any idea why? thanks in advance! |
No clue why that's happening, but hitting Alt-F7 should take you back to your gui desktop. If that doesn't work, try doing Alt-Fx with x=1 through 6 and see if you can get back to the gui.
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Alt-Fx turned out to be shortcuts (Alt-f2 for example opens Run Program dialog).
Alt-F7 and Ctl-Alt-F7 did get me back to the gui. One thing I noticed, though. Riight before I do a gui login, the virtualconsole login appears very, very quickly (I have a newbie book in front of me, that's how I knew it was a virtual console login). This last time, I was able to "catch" it and type my username, but just the same, it disappeared and proceeded to load the gui. ??? |
help please, anyone?
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Clueless about RH but maybe you're booting to a GUI by default and RH disables virtual consoles in that runlevel? Edit /etc/inittab to go to a console runlevel and/or add consoles to all runlevels?
Alt-F[n] cycles you through consoles - Ctrl-Alt-F[n] breaks you out of a GUI if there's any console to go to. |
thanks for your replies.
i tried changing the runlevel to a "3" and i got a console. i was able to play around with it fine. i "startx" and i got the gui fine. when i pressed ctl-alt-fn again to go back to the console, i got a blank screen again. |
Post your /etc/inittab file. That's what spawns the virtual terminals on boot by calling a "getty" program located in /sbin; the common ones are getty, agetty or mingetty. Here's mine from mandrake:
Code:
# The last six lines are for creating the virtual terminals 1 thru 6. The "respawn" in each line is important. That means that init should restart the command given in the entry when the getty process dies which is every time a user logs out. The "getty" program executes /bin/login to initiate a login session on that terminal. |
Quote:
Code:
startx & |
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