console to xterm
 

Hi. My suse 8.2 froze up for some reason and I had to reboot. Got the system and adsl network back up and working but it reboots in console mode. How do I get it back into xterminal mode

Andy

First make sure that the x-windows system will start up by entering 'startx'

If that is successful, you can change the default runlevel to '5' by editing a line in the /etc/inittab file.

The inittab line to change is:
# The default runlevel is defined here
id:3:initdefault:

change it to
id:5:initdefault:

You of course need to be root to edit this file.

HI, thanks for the reply. Startx and xterm both give me fatal error....screen not found ... and then return to console

Then you have a problem with either the Video card configuration/driver, or your mode-lines are bad.

First, change the video device to 'vesa'. This is a universal driver that works with nearly all video cards.

Then run SaX2 and configure the monitor. Make sure that you can get into X windows. If so, then you can rerun SaX2 and try to select your card. If that doesn't work, you'll need to supply more information about your video card and setup. For nvidia, you can download their driver installation program. I've had the same problem pop up for me, and rerunning the installation program for the video driver fixed the problem. It needs to be run as root in init level 3 (in the console), and you need to install the kernel-source for your version of the kernel first. Then re-run sax to configure your settings.

There is a program that can help you generate mode-lines if you need them.

gtf 1024 768 60 -x

will generate a mode-line for the 1024x768 resolution at 60 Hz. On my computer, the above command generates this:

# 1024x768 @ 60.00 Hz (GTF) hsync: 47.70 kHz; pclk: 64.11 MHz
Modeline "1024x768_60.00" 64.11 1024 1080 1184 1344 768 769 772 795 -HSync +Vsync

Of course, don't use my example. Its just to give you an idea.

One note: Sax doesn't behave very well if you have a second monitor. ( At least if it isn't a detected monitor ). The screen can loose a signal on both moniters, but of course, your results may vary. In such a case you will want to read up on manually configuring the XF86Config file.