I am on Fedora 5. No matter what I do I can't change runlevels without the system locking up? I am logged in as root user, I have tried going to run levels 1,2,3, or 4 and can't. I have removed services I thought were causing the hang ups. I am at a loss.

I need to get to a pure text environment so I can reload my Nvidia drivers which require NO GUI.

Please help me figure out why I can not change runlevels.

PS I used to do it all the time in SUSE 10 so I was surprized to see I am unable to with FC5??

Legolas

I've never had that problem with run levels before. Have you tried editing inittab to get it to boot into level 3?

I've had this problem before and the trick was to do something like CTRL-ALT-F8, CTRL-ALT-F1, login as root and then change the runlevel. I don't even know why that works, but it just did.

Galaxy_Stranger wrote
[HTML]#
# inittab This file describes how the INIT process should set up
# the system in a certain run-level.
#
# Author: Miquel van Smoorenburg, <miquels@drinkel.nl.mugnet.org>
# Modified for RHS Linux by Marc Ewing and Donnie Barnes
#

# Default runlevel. The runlevels used by RHS are:
# 0 - halt (Do NOT set initdefault to this)
# 1 - Single user mode
# 2 - Multiuser, without NFS (The same as 3, if you do not have networking)
# 3 - Full multiuser mode
# 4 - unused
# 5 - X11
# 6 - reboot (Do NOT set initdefault to this)
#
id:5:initdefault:

# System initialization.
si::sysinit:/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit

l0:0:wait:/etc/rc.d/rc 0
l1:1:wait:/etc/rc.d/rc 1
l2:2:wait:/etc/rc.d/rc 2
l3:3:wait:/etc/rc.d/rc 3
l4:4:wait:/etc/rc.d/rc 4
l5:5:wait:/etc/rc.d/rc 5
l6:6:wait:/etc/rc.d/rc 6

# Trap CTRL-ALT-DELETE
ca::ctrlaltdel:/sbin/shutdown -t3 -r now

# When our UPS tells us power has failed, assume we have a few minutes
# of power left. Schedule a shutdown for 2 minutes from now.
# This does, of course, assume you have powerd installed and your
# UPS connected and working correctly.
pf:owerfail:/sbin/shutdown -f -h +2 "Power Failure; System Shutting Down"

# If power was restored before the shutdown kicked in, cancel it.
pr:12345owerokwait:/sbin/shutdown -c "Power Restored; Shutdown Cancelled"


# Run gettys in standard runlevels
1:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty1
2:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty2
3:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty3
4:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty4
5:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty5
6:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty6

# Run xdm in runlevel 5
x:5nce:/etc/X11/prefdm -nodaemo[/HTML]

Looking at the current inittab file and it is set up for runlevel 5 as it should.. what should it look like for Run Level 3? What changes should I Make..I suspect that the few lines to change would be these two lines but I don't want to mess it up:

id:5:initdefault:

# Run xdm in runlevel 5
x:5: once:/etc/X11/prefdm -nodaemo

My guess would be:
1. change id:5:initdefault: to id:3:initdefault:
2. And to line out the (x:5: once:/etc/X11/prefdm -nodaemo) with
(# x:5 once:/etc/X11/prefdm -nodaemo)

Reddazz wrote: Can you elaborate on when you did this?

I just find it really strange that of all the thousands of FC5 users, that I would have this problem ahhhggg! There is really nothing special or different from about my system.

Thanks for the help

Exactly.

Thanks I'll give it a try and see

Hi,

There is anotehr simple work around to the problem. On start uop press and hold down the {A} key when your boot loader is dsiplayed. This will give you a CLI, then type init 3, log into your system, and start the GUI with the start x command.