Probably a stupid question on Xwindows
 

Mandrake 8.1, xwindows starts automatically. When I login as root and choose failsafe, the console does not take any keyboard input, altho I can past with my mouse, whoop-de-doo. How do I get to a simple console with root and why is this console in X frozen?

first off, why are you choosing failsafe.. ?? if your asking how to just boot to a normal command and not into X, just edit your inittab file to start in runlevel 3 instead of 5... save changes, run telinit and reboot to test..
or once upon boot, press ctrl-alt-F1 thru F6 to get to a command..

Thanks! I can get to normal command now - still curious about why failsafe is quirky!