How do I switch to text login while at the graphical login screen?
 

I am trying to load up the NVidia driver in Fedora 15 and am stuck. After boot up the graphical login screen comes up fine but when I go to log in I get an error message and it asks me to try to login again. I need to be able to get into text mode so I can edit some files but I do not know how to do this other that starting in multi-uder mode by editing /etc/inittab (or in FC15, editing some links in /etc/systemd/system/). Is there a way to get to text mode from the graphical loginscreen or do I need to get a rescue disk and startup in rescue mode to change files?

Thanks!

Without knowing what error message you get, I can only say that if you can't login in the graphical login screen, you probably won't be able to login in text mode.

However, you can boot into text mode. When the grub menu comes up, press the letter e on the keyboard to edit the boot parameters. Enter "init 3" (without quotes) and press enter. That should boot into runlevel 3 (multi-user text mode).

As I stated above, you will probably still get an error message when you try to login. So, we really need to know what error message you get in order to be able to help you.

You can also boot a liveCD and mount your Fedora partition to edit the file(s) you need to edit. Then reboot to see if your edit(s) worked.

The error message is the standard message that comes up when X fails to start, something like "Oops something went wrong, trying loging in again etc...".

When I boot up I dont get a tradition grub boot menu screen, it goes straight into loading fedora 15. Is there a way to get the grub menu to come up? If not how can I mount my partition while running the liveCD??\

Thanks

That is usually a result of having hiddenmenu enabled in the /boot/grub/grub.conf file. You would need to mount your system partition or your boot partition if it is separate and just put a hash mark in front of the hiddenmenu line: #hiddenmenu

Without knowing your partition setup, it will be difficult to give specifics. Boot the Live CD and log in as root and run the command: fdisk -l(lower cae letter L in the command) and post that info here. Someone will be able to give you specific steps to mount and access the file.

Try CTRL + ALT + F1 or F2~F6 at the graphical login screen. It works like charm in both slackware and ubuntu. Hope it helps.