mandrake booting to x
 

yeah, i feel pretty bad about asking this, but i guess this is what this forum is for.

well, i installed mandrake on my friend's computer, but the installation was all screwed up. we finally got it done, but it wouldn't boot right into x windows. we were able to login and all, but i'm not sure of exactly what to do after that to get into x.

what i mean is that i don't know what commands to type or anything. help would be appreciated. i'm not a lost cause.

run startx, you can make X load autoamtically by going to drakconf and setting it there under boot

yeah, i tried startx. but it gave an error, it couldn't initialize the x server or something. i think this is due to the fact that mandrake wouldn't install xfree or had problems installing xfree and other miscellaneous packages.

even if this is the problem, why does the mandrake installation get messed up? i think it might have something to do with the cd rom drive, but i can't say for sure. any suggestions?

thanks,
andrew

check the video card

If you're using cheesy install CDs that you got with a book/magazine, or CDs burned from an iso, you could have a bum disk. If you bought the distro as a shrink-wrapped set, that's probably not the case though. What type of installation did you do (e.g., workstation, server, custom)?


If for some reason the install errors aren't the root <edit>pun not intended</edit> of your problem, you can try to configure X from the command line by typing Xconfigurator (case sensitive).

the errors i get during install are just random packages, but one is xfree, so i think that has something to do with x not working at all. we're on our 4th distro now... we've tried mandrake 8.1, redhat 7.2, slackware 8.0, and now suSE 7.3, which is still downloading.

i honestly don't think i have a bum disk, because the same thing happened with redhat and mandrake. also, redhat and mandrake installed fine on my computer.

if suSE doesn't work, we're just going to try another distro. come on, all i want is a linux box. :*(

andrew

If it had problems installing the X rpm files at install time, could you not install them from the command prompt afterwards?

i'd really like to try to install x from the command line, but alas, i do not know how.

suggestions would be ridiculously helpful :D

andrew

Ok. With Mandy, when the files are being installed, if you get any error messages, not them down precisely. If you know which CD is in the drive and which file(s) it had problems with, so long as there aren't too many (and proving that you don't have serious dependancy problems) you can simply boot into Linux and install them later. If it has problems installing the RPM files for X, then you will boot into text mode. From here you should:

Mount the CD (mount /mnt/cdrom)
Move to the CD (cd /mnt/cdrom/Mandrake/RPMS?)
Install the RPMS that you noted (rpm -i xxxx.rpm).

With any luck, this should be all you need to do. You might get some error messages (normally dependancy problems), but they are fairly self explanatory.

Lets us know how you got on.

okay, so i tried to manually installed the packages (there were nine of them). when we instaled 'XFree86-4.1.0-17mdk.i586", we got several warings about how it created thinfgs as ".rpmnew, ,but no errors.

so when i tried to run starttx, i got:

execve failed for /etc/X11/X (errno2)
giving up.
xinit: No such file or directory (errno 2): unable to connect to X serverxinit: No such process (errno 3): Server error.

i checked the folder "/etc/X11/" and there in fact was no "X" listed. again, i am not sure why, i'd really like to know what makes mandrake not install properly on this computer.

thanks
andrew

if you didn't install it originally, and that's all you installed, you'll need a load more files as well as just that, XFree86-server contains teh /etc/X11/X file, even if it's not actaully a file anyway... but then you need -libs -75dpi -100dpi and -devel if you want to compile programs.

i don't really need to compile programs, but i believe what you're telling me is that i need to install the XFree86 server as well. i am going to try that. if that doesn't work, expect another post shorttly ^_^

thanks
andrew