I installed red hat 9 on my server but when it starts up it goes into a text interface, when I installed red hat i chose knome

Does anyone know how I can get the knome rather than the konsol look(black background white text)

Red Hat 9 is out of date and unsupported now, so you'd be better off installing a newer distro. Also, it's "GNOME".

You should be able to run "startx" as your regular user or run "init 5" as root. If you want to boot to a graphical login, then you'll have to change your default runlevel to 5. Edit /etc/inittab as root and look for the line "id:3:initdefault:". You'll want to change 3 to 5.

when i type it comes up saying

Apparently there really is a knome. OP, which are you really asking about?

Given that RH9, is old & unsupported -- i.e. there will be no more security patches -- & therefore insecure, why are you using it, especially for a server?

I believe in moving forward, as you suggest. In addition, I suggest that the Emo Elmo pick a newer distro with the 2.6 kernel, tz support, and so on. Given Fedora's release cycle and shorter-term support, CentOS seems to be the likely replacement.

As to Red Hat 9 (or 7 for that matter), I have spoken with a lot of level-headed, security-oriented Linux professionals They are disgusted by recent distros turning into so-called "bloatware". These folks would rather download patches, even a new kernel, and build all that, rather than install a distro with lots of bells and whistles. I like the self-reliance these folks have but do not have the time to rebuild everything, especially distro components.

Red Hat Enterprise is one of the worst offenders, but we have to use it. I commend Red Hat for a very uniform installation experience, though. It is good, and very repeatable. However, I wish more distros would take an Ubuntu Server approach and start with minimal-ware without all the extra stuff.